


Every Right Thing Will Find Its Right Place

by gayfranzkafka



Category: MASH (TV), Voyná i mir | War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Genre: (the bed sharing and the pining are all Hunnihawk), Also Andrei & Natasha are both 25 yrs old in this fic, Andrei doesn't die, F/M, Fix-It, M/M, Mutual Pining, Sharing a Bed, also homophobia doesn't exist it's just their own repression which keeps them apart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:53:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25084972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayfranzkafka/pseuds/gayfranzkafka
Summary: Do you want to read about Hawkeye & BJ if they were suddenly doctors in 19th century Russia who each think their repressed gay love is unrequited? Hawkeye & BJ treat and counsel two lovers Andrei & Natasha while they all flee a burning Moscow, and it just might force BJ & Hawkeye to confront their own feelings for each other. You don't have to know about War & Peace to understand this M*A*S*H fic I promise! If you do know it it's just a fun bonus for you. Have you ever wondered what it would sound like if a M*A*S*H episode were recounted in the style of Leo Tolstoy?  Were you sad about Tolstoy killing off Andrei even though you have to admit it was a subversion of the usual “woman losing the will to live and dying for no apparent reason” trope and did you think, “I bet he would have lived if BJ & Hawkeye treated him”? Have you ever wanted to read about Father Mulcahy as an Eastern Orthodox priest discussing divine versus human love with a wounded Russian aristocrat in the back of a cart fleeing as the French march into Moscow? If you answered yes to any of these questions then this is the fic for you.
Relationships: Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky/Natalya "Natasha" Ilyinichna Rostova, B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Comments: 35
Kudos: 42





	1. Chapter 1

When Andrei was moved off the battlefield at Borodino and temporarily into Moscow, two doctors went with him who would ultimately save his life. After Borodino, Andrei’s life was at stake twice: once, when the wound was fresh, and the doctor Pierce operated on him right off the field; and a second time, when he had begun to recover his physical strength but his will to live wavered. In both these cases, not just in the first instance, the doctors Pierce and Hunnicutt were an essential element of his recovery. Though both doctors were uncontestably skilled surgeons, neither of them might have seemed, at first glance, the most likely candidates to aid in the second instance, that is, in addressing the crisis that caused Andrei’s will to live to waver for a time. This is because Andrei’s internal crisis seemed, at first blush, to be a religious one, which neither Pierce nor Hunnicutt was particularly suited to address. In all actuality, Andrei’s crisis was not one of faith but one concerning the nature of love, both divine and human.

Hunnicutt and Pierce, it is true, did not tend toward excessive oration on existential questions of any kind, whether they concerned religion or love. Or, rather, it was not that they lacked oratory skills so much as that they greatly misused them. They were much more lent to address crises of existential dread with buffoonery rather than philosophy, and while this tendency may have been what preserved their sanity on the battlefield, it was not one that Andrei would have responded to well. It is not that Pierce and Hunnicutt were lacking in philosophical convictions – indeed, Pierce in particular harbored strong anti-war sentiments, although he was reluctant to express them in mixed company lest Villarsky or his crew get wind of it and accuse him of Masonic and anti-patriotic tendencies.* (The accusations themselves wouldn’t have bothered him if it were not for the potential consequences that went along with them: imprisonment or, in some particularly cruel cases, even death.) It was just that they were not wont to express such convictions in what most would consider to be within the intellectual tradition. 

Still, even though both doctors tended toward addressing their own crises more with absurdist humor than coherent argument, each of them still possessed, underneath this reluctance to wax poetic, a strong if not unwavering belief in the goodness of human life. It was the demonstration of this seemingly basic belief (yet a belief that most people during wartime found themselves lacking) not verbally but through their actions (both in the care of their patients and their attitude toward each other), that eventually succeeded in bolstering Andrei’s spirits enough to keep him alive.

When Andrei was moved from Borodino to Moscow, both doctors should not have even gone with him. The group of wounded, of which Andrei was a part and which sought temporary refugee in the Rostov’s estate, was a small one. When one considered the small size of that particular group in the face of the great losses that the Russian army had suffered at Borodino and the therefore relative dearth of qualified physicians available, it should have been clear that either Pierce or Hunnicutt should have gone off to tend to some other group of wounded men. And indeed one of them might have, were it not for a few complicating factors.

One of these factors was the reluctance of Pierce and Hunnicutt to be parted from one another, particularly in the face of such an uncoordinated Russian retreat that might exacerbate the length of any prospectively short separation. Hunnicutt and Pierce had not known one another before their time serving in the army, but it was clear to all that worked alongside the two men that something more than brotherhood existed between them, although the two men themselves seemed to be hardly aware of it. Or perhaps it was not a question of being unawares – though they did not speak of it to one another, let alone acknowledge it to themselves, it seemed to others as though what existed between them was as natural to the doctors as a love of God is to pilgrims. It therefore seemed hardly necessary, or perhaps impossible, for them to express in words this love that was so essential to each of their persons.

It seemed to those that knew them that while they never spoke of this love out loud, it was there in the core of every one of their actions; it was there not just in the quiet moments around the fire when they would pass spirits back and forth in companionable malarkey, but also every time they worked on a wounded man fresh off the battlefield. Even when one of them of them was resting or out in the field, and so the other doctor worked without his friend’s banter to lessen the horror of the wounds he was working on, there still seemed to be something of that essence of the relationship there which strengthened and aided each man’s ability to care for the wounded before him. One man need not be physically present for the other man to be aware of the quiet conviction of his love for the other, and for this love to thus strengthen his love for all others before him, even the soldier in off the battlefield who he had never known before this instant, and for that conviction and love to further strengthen his belief in the precociousness of each life, and thus aid in his efforts to do what he could to save each soldier who came before him.

So it was true that the love Hunnicutt and Pierce felt was great, and they would have been reluctant to leave each other after the battle of Borodino and in the following chaos. Still, this alone was not a significant enough factor to insure both of them a place at Andrei’s bedside, as each placed perhaps only one thing above his personal commitment to the other: a commitment not to God or to his country, but to the simple fact of humanity. Though both Pierce and Hunnicutt, of course, observed the requisite divine liturgies and so forth, neither felt the conviction of religion deep within him. But they held a conviction as strong as any truly believing Christian in the goodness of community and their obligation for charity. The difference was that this conviction followed, for them, not out of a reading of the gospels but out of their specific love made general. Simply put, the deep love that each of them felt in specificity for the other, he also felt, in generality, toward the whole of his fellow man.

The love that Pierce felt for Hunnicutt and which Hunnicutt felt for Pierce illuminated, for each of them, all that could be most good in fellow man, and seeing it so strongly in one another, they were then able to recognize that goodness or the potential for that goodness in not just one another but every stranger in off the road. They believed that others were good, or could be good, because they saw the goodness in each other; further, each saw the other as the one who held more strongly in his heart that dedication to the goodness of others, which only strengthened their admiration for one another, and thus only strengthened their commitment to the good of the larger whole as well.

And so, if it had been required of them, each would have been motivated, out of that commitment to their fellow man, to do all they could to help save the lives of the wounded from Borodino; if it had been required, they would have parted ways. More than that, they not only _would_ have parted ways if they had been directed to, in order to save more lives; they in fact _knew_ that the army, after the battle, had more wounded than it could care for and that, in order to do the best good, they should ideally separate from one another for a time. But as each man in the army also knows, though the army asks every one in its ranks to set aside his humanity and work toward supposed greater good that is above any one man, the army is made up only of men, men unable to step outside their specific humanity to truly grasp these supposed greater goals and to know how to reach them. And so each man, from the lowliest soldier and especially to the generals, is only one man setting aside his humanity to commit atrocities – to fight and to kill – and in doing so, he damages his humanity, and thus he damages the greater good as well, and all the while there is no one making any sort of decisions toward something grander, but instead there is only each man sure that somehow, somewhere, someone is making sure this will all be worth it in the end.

To put it this way: during battle, by the time each order from on high is formulated by the generals and conveyed to the majors, the small decisions of each lowly foot soldier has already shifted the realities of the battlefield so that not only are the orders now impossible to carry out, but they also seem almost incomprehensibly alien. Further, in the hours following the battle of Borodino and the subsequent retreat, these same generals and majors failed to grasp the realities of the retreat: how many were wounded, and where these wounded were, and where the doctors were, and where the doctors should go to best help the wounded. And so Pierce and Hunnicutt not only received no orders to separate – further, they received no information that might elucidate for them where the other wounded were. Not knowing this, there was more of a chance that, were one of them to venture out onto the streets in Moscow to attempt to help more wounded, he would find none, and instead be confronting with looting soldiers, panicked civilians, or the like – namely, that he would encounter all means of people who might delay or even unintentionally harm him, and none that he himself might help.

And so Pierce and Hunnicutt stayed together, and were frustrated once again not only by confronting the fact of so many young men senselessly wounded but further by their feeling that they should be doing more to help these men, and that their superiors should be doing more; namely, putting an end to what seemed to them to be a senselessly begun and senselessly continued war, but if not that then at least better coordinating the effort to disseminate useful information among those subjected to the devastation wrought on the field. But they also felt, perhaps a little shamefully to themselves, glad to be with one another still, especially with Moscow about to be taken and the French so near.

And so Hunnicutt and Pierce found themselves, as was mentioned above, in the estate of the Rostovs, the only family in the area to have opened their home to the wounded. “It’s a pity the French are seeing Moscow in September,” Pierce told Hunnicutt as they made their way past servants and members of the Rostov family, who were hurrying to box their possession to take on their retreat out of the Moscow the next day. “I always found May to be the best time to see the city by far.”

“And with all the locals headed for stays in the countryside in unprecedented numbers, they won’t have anyone with inside knowledge of which sights are the best to burn,” Hunnicutt replied. If any of the Rostovs had paused long enough to hear the two doctors joking about the burning of the city, they would have been beyond indignant. Having only just now resigned themselves to leaving the city, they had not yet allowed themselves to consider the possibility that the beloved capitol, once under the control of the French, might burn. Hunnicutt and Pierce, on the other hand, having experienced for so long already the horrors of war, found their minds drawn almost immediately to the worst possibilities, and sought to make light of such possibilities before they had time to dwell more darkly on the realities of them. Luckily, their more gauche remarks went entirely unnoticed by the Rostovs, as they were so concerned with the packing of their belongings. The Rostovs were, after all, civilians unused to the realities of war and had focused, so far, only of preserving their own wealth and not at all of what fate might soon befall the city at large.

This lack of concern on the part of the Rostovs was, it must be admitted, indeed motivated in part by the selfishness inherent in almost all people as wealthy as they were. Their daughter Natasha was the one most clearly concerned not just with the fate of the family but of other as well; she had been the one to convince her parents to open their home to the wounded, despite none of their neighbors having done so. After she had convinced them to undertake the most basic of charities, however, everyone else had almost immediately undertaken the task of distracting _her_ with the logistics of packing; Natasha’s cousin and good friend Sonya had recognized Andrei (her ex-fiancé) among the wounded, and the general consensus, once the information had been relayed, was that Natasha should not be told of his presence.

So it must also be admitted that part of the household’s concern with their own material possessions was an unconscious protection on their part, both of Natasha from having to know Andrei was here and possibly dying, and of themselves from having to consider the larger ramifications of what leaving Moscow might mean. They had gone, in the span of a few hours, from having been almost totally sheltered from the physical realities of the war, to having their own home filled to the brim with gravely injured and, in some cases, possibly dying men. A concern about which sets of dishes to bring with them as they left the city was, no doubt, selfish, but the Rostovs were not as entirely callous as they might appear have appeared just then.

Still, though Hunnicutt and Pierce might have conceded this point in intellectual conversation, having to walk past the first nice set of plates they had seen in months, let alone to overhear debate about _which_ sets to bring, all while they were trying to assess which of their patients needed further care to live through the night, did nothing to set them at ease. Pierce and Hunnicutt entered one of the bedrooms where a number of the injured men had been put; just as they were entering, a woman walked out carrying a large rug. Pierce, upon seeing this, turned to one of the patients closest to the door and told him, “Oh, yes, we forget to tell you to be careful not to bleed on any of the household’s finer furnishings.” Neither the patient nor the woman carrying the rug gave any indication that they had heard him.

One of the men staying in this room was Andrei, who was still suffering so gravely from his wound that he was not fully aware of where he was. Perhaps that was for the better, for if he had been more clearly aware of his surroundings, he would have recognized the house at once – for the second-eldest daughter of the Rostovs, Natasha, was of course the very same woman who Andrei had been engaged to for a year when they were both twenty-five, until she had almost run off with another man (Kuragin), after which, though she was clearly regretfully and said as much many times, Andrei had found himself unable to continue the engagement. Andrei and Natasha had not seen each other since Andrei had ended the engagement, and indeed, Andrei had also not seen Kuragin since he had heard of Kuragin’s role in Natasha’s little dalliance – that is, until Andrei had seen, before passing into unconsciousness, Kuragin wounded on the table next to him in the medical tent.

Hunnicutt and Pierce knew all too well how many “repeat customers” tended to come through their medical tent, and Andrei was indeed one of these men who had had the joy of experiencing a grave wound as a result of battle more than once, though it had not been Hunnicutt and Pierce who had treated him the first time. It was twice now that Andrei had come close to death, and it was not yet clear whether he would survive this most recent brush with the world beyond our own.

It was this second brush with death that had caused Andrei, for perhaps the first time, to experience a bit of the love without which Hunnicutt and Pierce would never have made it this far in the war. For so long, not just Andrei but most of those closest to him had feared Andrei and Kuragin meeting; all were sure that if the two were to happen upon each other, whether in high society in Moscow or once they had both gone back out to battle, that Andrei would be unable to contain his rage at Kuragin having set his sights on Natasha, and that a duel would have inevitably taken place.

When their paths finally had crossed earlier today in the medical tent, it was not just the fact that both parties were already grievously injured that had kept Andrei from challenging Kuragin. Andrei had experienced, in that tent and for the second time in his life, a phenomenon quite common among soldiers. He had experienced a complete reworking of his innermost convictions after having come close to dying. In that tent, Andrei had felt that he was experiencing eternal love, divine love, for the first time. He was suddenly filled with the conviction that it was only love that would persist after death, and thus only love that mattered. This love so filled him that upon seeing Kuragin, Andrei felt no lingering hostility and, in fact, was able to forgive him without hesitation. This was not a forgiveness he voiced aloud; both parties were too injured for any words to pass between them – but it was a forgiveness he felt inside himself with full conviction nonetheless.

Before this, Andrei had always been a pessimist; he had, like Hunnicutt and Pierce, harbored no particular religious conviction and participated in the church only so far as he felt himself obligated to. In fact, he had looked with disdain on his sister’s sincere interest in the gospel and in hosting pilgrims at their estate. But, unlike the doctors, Andrei had not been able to find faith in his fellow men either. Hunnicutt and Pierce would, of course, have both proclaimed themselves bitterly convinced of the rottenness of many of said fellow men, but their actions spoke otherwise, as they worked tirelessly to save the lives of anyone who needed them.

Andrei, on the other had, found his distaste for religion matched only by his distaste for most other people. Before he had gone to war, Andrei had been disgusted by the trappings of society, and perhaps his most closely held ideals had been his belief in the military way of life; his father had been a high-ranking man in the army, and before Andrei had joined himself, he had viewed the army as a potential escape from the frivolous concerns of parties, gossip, and inheritances. Indeed, though Andrei had gone to fight against Napoleon’s army, he had held Napoleon in the highest esteem, an example of how a man might prove himself and his worthiness through battle.

Andrei’s experiences in the army had soon robbed him of any illusions as to Napoleon’s greatness or the hopes of finding any ideals at all present in any military man. He had soon found himself as disillusioned by the people he worked alongside in the battlefield as he had been with those in St. Petersburg. He had been left without convictions, though after the first instance of his life almost being taken from him, he had turned to charitable work as a means of meaning-making, and this, combined with his engagement to Natasha, had perhaps given him renewed purpose. After the breaking off of the engagement, though, Andrei had found himself once again adrift; that is, until his sudden religious turn a mere day ago.

And so Andrei found himself, for the first time, experiencing perhaps some of the hope that his two doctors had always felt (if not always unwaveringly) deep down. The difference was, Hunnicutt and Pierce came to this hope for the betterment of society through their specific love of individuals, namely each other; Andrei, on the other hand, had arrived at that universal (what he understood as divine) love first, and that had led him back to his specific love of Natasha second.

Because Andrei did want to see Natasha, again. Perhaps it was seeing Kuragin; perhaps he was, on some level, dimly aware that it was her house he had been moved to – but most probably, the reason that his thoughts now turned to her was that he had loved her, desperately, since the first time he had heard her voice on the balcony above him, calling out to her cousin Sonya at two am about how lovely the moon was; he had been able to see, then, because of her, the beauty of the moonlit valley before him in a way he never had before. He had loved her ever since then, and he had not truly stopped loving her even when he had broken off the engagement. Indeed, it had only been a pride born out of the values of the society he claimed to despise which had caused him to break off the engagement, nothing more. And so it was only natural that in his current state, after his second almost-death had stripped away the last of his concerns with propriety and high society that he hadn’t known he still held; in this state, it was only natural that this feeling of eternal love which renewed his spirit would lead him, first, back to his feelings for Natasha which had never truly left him.

The problem was, this love having stemmed from a universal feeling first and having led Andrei back to his feelings for Natasha second, he worried, in his half-unconscious, half-aware state, that this love for Natasha was a dilution of the holy love that he had felt in those first hours after his injury and upon seeing Kuragin’s face. It was this problem that Andrei wrestled with – his love for Natasha was what grounded him in the world, but he worried that perhaps, having experienced divine love, he should not _want_ to be grounded in the world. In his half-aware state, the problem seemed an existential one to Andrei. But had Hunnicutt and Pierce known just exactly what was passing through their patient’s mind, they would have found it a much more materially significant question: a question of their patient’s will to live.

As it stood, Hunnicutt and Pierce did not know all that was racing through Andrei’s mind. They knew only that the patient they were now standing before looked fevered. After the woman had left with the rug, Pierce and Hunnicutt had entered the room to see almost no furniture remained in it aside from the beds in which the wounded soldiers lay. They had turned their attention immediately to the patients and, having assessed the others in the room first and ascertained that none of them were in truly critical condition, they had come, at last, to Andrei

“What about this one?” Hunnicutt asked Pierce as Pierce checked the dressing for blood then took Andrei’s temperature.

“I operated on him back on the field,” Pierce said. “His fever shouldn’t be this high.”

“Yes, well, there are few things in this war that are going as they _should_ ,” Hunnicutt told Pierce as both doctors looked over the patient more closely, checking for signs of infection.

As they examined him, Andrei could be heard to mumble “Natasha”, barely audibly.

“Only my closest friends call me that,” Pierce told Andrei. It did not occur to either doctor that Andrei was, in fact, calling for the very same Natasha who was so graciously hosting them all.

After having done all they could for the man (which wasn’t much, given the circumstances), Pierce and Hunnicutt made their way out of the room. Andrei had been the last of their patients they had needed to look over, and both doctors were practically asleep on their feet as they looked about for where they themselves might lie down for the night. Their eyes landed on Natasha, who happened to be passing through the hallway.

“Any telling where two doctors might find some beds?” Hunnicutt called out to her.

She looked up, briefly startled, but then quickly made her way over to the two men. “Yes, right this way,” she said, beginning to lead them down the long hallway as she told them, “We’ve already put some of your other men up for the night. How are the patients doing?” Her question was born out of a mere general concern, as she did not realize that mere minutes ago these men had overheard her former fiancé calling her name.

“Oh, just dandy,” Pierce told her. “We’ve got one who we think might make gold in the next Olympics despite his recent amputation.”

Natasha gave Pierce a blank look, not understanding. “You’ll have to excuse him,” Hunnicutt said. “We’ve had quite a long day.” Behind her back, he shot Pierce a look as if asking him not to antagonize the woman who’d opened up her doors for them.

“I’m sure,” she replied. They passed the rest of the walk in silence until she led them into the small side room where some of their compatriots already lay sleeping. It was one of her father’s offices and not well equipped for anyone to spend a comfortable night there. Father Mulcahy and O’Reilly were already asleep, one on the couch and the other on a makeshift mattress. There remained only one more mattress and a chair. “We’ve given over all the rest of the rooms to the wounded,” Natasha said apologetically.

“No need to worry,” Pierce said. “It’s a beautiful little place you’ve got here. With a few renovations this place will make a lovely home. We can put the kitchen where the desk in now and big claw foot tub in place of the fireplace.”

“I’ve always wanted a garden,” Hunnicutt said, gesturing to the fireplace. “What if we put a few rosebushes and planter beds over there instead?”

“That’s a much better idea,” Pierce replied. “No one bathes in the army anyway.”

Under other circumstances, Natasha might have appreciated and even joined in on the doctor’s clownery. As it was, given the late hour, the pressing need to continue packing, and the confusion of hosting so many wounded, she merely asked them if she could get them anything else, then left them alone in the room and made her way back out to the hallway in search of more things in need of packing.

Both men, though exhausted, seemed reluctant to settle down for the night. Neither of them wanted to confront the issue of who should take the chair and who should take the bed; though they had spent years now in narrow cots mere feet apart, and even woken one another up from many a nightmare, to share a bed seemed unspeakably intimate to the both of them. If the others in the room had been awake, they would have thought nothing of the two men settling down together for the night, and indeed already assumed they had been doing so for a while now. But Hunnicutt and Pierce alike perceived the other as both the better doctor and the better man, and thus carried the assumption that the particular love he felt for the other was not returned. Thus the unbearable question of who should take the bed. Each wanted to offer it to the other, and each knew the other would refuse, and neither wanted to suggest a more serious playing out of the cohabitation they had joked about mere minutes ago.

And so, instead, Hunnicutt made his way over to the large wooden desk near the window. He picked up a large glass vessel containing some sort of clear liquid, opened its top, and inhaled. “I don’t think we’ve had vodka like this in quite a while.” He looked around and found two glasses sitting on a side table next to one of the bookshelves.

“Ah, but should we partake?” Pierce said as Hunnicutt began to pour himself a glass. “The fine people of this house may come back any minute now realizing they’ve forgotten to pack up their spirits.” Even as he said this, though, he was already taking the second glass, now also full, from Hunnicutt’s hand.

“We’re doing them a favor,” Hunnicutt said. “One less item to try and squeeze into their carriages tomorrow. Depending on just how much of this we drink, we could really be freeing up a lot of room.” As they talked, Mulcahy and O’Reilly slept on soundly – as they were used to sleeping with the sounds of war nearby, the exchanging of a few jovial remarks between their colleagues would not cause them to stir. 

“Well, in that case,” Pierce said, and raised his glass to his lips. Both of them leaned against the desk, half seated on top of whatever papers it was that the old count Rostov had not deigned to pack up earlier. They surveyed the small room as if it truly were the small cottage they’d spoken of earlier, as if they were already out of Moscow and could see out beyond the walls into open fields and forest. They lapsed quickly again into their earlier joke, Pierce gesturing over toward the empty fireplace and telling Hunnicutt, “If we do put that garden in there, though, will it just be flowers you’re growing or will we have vegetables as well? I’ll cook us a new soup every day with fresh vegetables from the garden, and for dessert we’ll have strawberries and cream every night. Nothing like what we’re eating now.”

“Sure,” Hunnicutt replied easily. “What’s the saying? A man can’t live on roses alone, but he must have bread as well**? The roses are a practicality – fresh lettuce, now that’s romantic.”

Each man, as he joked, could see the whole of their domestic life spreading out easily before him, indeed could see and understand it more easily than he could the realities of where they actually found themselves; each man, too, thought that it was only he who saw it, that for the other it truly was just another lark. And still they each indulged themselves in furthering the joke, finding it sweet enough to hear the other talk about this imagined future even if they perceived each sentence of the other’s to be in jest.

“I’ll bet you’re a terrible, cook, though,” Hunnicutt added. “I know it’ll end up with me doing both all the gardening and the cooking.”

“It’s true that I have a bad back and can’t be bending over to get root vegetables out of the ground,” Pierce told him. “But my soups! You haven’t lived till you’ve tried my soups. And the amount of sweaters I’ll knit you once this war is over and I have enough time to do more than darn socks and sew up intestines.”

“If you’re making the soups then I’m making the salads,” Hunnicutt said. “I make an amazing vinegret***.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Pierce said. “Speaking of my bad back,” he continued, “I’ve got to sit down.” He went over to the chair behind the desk – a huge one with velvet upholstery – and sat himself down in it.

“Oh, I know what you’re doing,” Hunnicutt said. “Your bad back is precisely why you can’t spend all night in that chair, especially given the fact that who knows what form of transport we’ll find out of Moscow tomorrow.”

“No, no,” Pierce said. “I have one of those backs where it’s better for me to sleep sitting up anyway. Besides, if we drink enough of this vodka neither of us will know what city we’re in, let alone care what our sleeping arrangements are.”

“You’re not an old man just quite yet. Let me take the chair. It’ll make me feel like a civilian doctor, falling asleep at my desk after reading the latest medical journals.”

“No, no, it’s my turn to pretend to be the civilian doctor with the successful medical practice,” Pierce retorted. Each man continued like this for quite a minute longer, arguing persistently that _he_ should take the chair like it was a cross he was throwing himself upon, despite the fact that the sad little mattress on the floor was probably, in all reality, not much more comfortable. And each man continued to drank large gulps of vodka between each of his arguments.

Finally, having drunk quite the hearty amount of alcohol and determined to win the argument one way or the other, Hunnicutt got up from his position of half-sitting on the desk and came around to the chair where Pierce was. “Let’s get you into bed,” he said, and each man was so set on stubbornly winning the argument that neither seemed to realize what other meanings such a sentence might have. A brief struggle then ensued, in which Hunnicutt tried to physically remove Pierce from the chair while Pierce tried his best to remain seated. It became quickly evident that Pierce had never once in his life participated in any sort of athletic activity, and Hunnicutt proceeded to successfully half-carry Pierce to the mattress. Hunnicutt’s own inebriation then worked against him, though, as once he set Pierce down, Pierce succeeded in toppling Hunnicutt onto the mattress as well.

For a second, neither of them proceeded to say anything or to attempt to move themselves out of their tangled position. Both seemed to realize that they had inadvertently led themselves to the exact position they had feared, that is, that they had found themselves in bed with the man who they believed did not return their affections. For a minute, each silently weighed his anxiety against his stubbornness, and each found, inevitably, that his stubbornness won. Straightening himself out, Pierce said, “Well, if I have to sleep in the bed then you do too.”

“Fine,” Hunnicutt said, and both of them did their best to roll over to their own small side of the mattress. Whether it was the amount of alcohol each had drank or the physical exhaustion of the day finally catching up to them, both Pierce and Hunnicutt found themselves, now that they were finally laid down, giving in quickly to sleep. And though, as they passed from the waking world into dreaming, they remained on their opposite sides of the small bed, by the time morning came and Father Mulcahy arose with the dawn, he found both men curled into each other, Hunnicutt’s chin on Pierce’s shoulders. Father Mulcahy found the sight of the two sleeping men quite sweet and never guessed that what he was witnessing was anything out of the ordinary for the pair. In sleeping, their bodies did what their minds usually kept them from, and allowed them to find as much comfort in one another’s physical being as they always had from one another’s intellectual presence in their waking lives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * Gotta have footnotes so it truly feels like you’re reading War & Peace (lol). Truly though I promise this fic won’t be chock-full of references to obscure parts of Tolstoy’s 1,200 word novel, I just thought that the parallels between Vallarsky (a man who believed that since Masons believed in world peace and pacifism they were traitors to Russia & thus hunted them down ruthlessly) & McCarthism were fascinating, so you KNEW I had to put one small reference to it in here  
> ** I know this phrase literally did not exist yet but we are all about anachronism in this fic  
> *** This one isn’t an anachronism the Russians had a salad starting in the late 1700s that took its name from the French dressing.
> 
> Thanks for reading the first chapter! I've only read the book never seen any film adaptations of War and Peace, so if you know a film version & there's inconsistencies, that's why (although obviously I've changed a few things, such as Andrei's death, on purpose)! I'm basing my spelling of everyone's names from War and Peace off of the translation I read (Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky's). I'll be updating once a week if not more frequently, and as the work is already planned out, more than halfway done, and only four chapters, it should be wrapped up in a pretty timely manner!
> 
> As always, kudos and especially comments are appreciated.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first bit of this chapter is all War & Peace characters but I promise the doctors make their appearance before too long!

After Natasha had left Pierce and Hunnicutt to their arguments and alcohol, she had intended to spend at least a few more hours packing all that was left of the home as best she could. Determinedly she made her way back towards the hallway where they had interrupted her, but on the way she found herself pulled aside by her cousin Sonya. “I’ve got to talk to you,” Sonya told her. Unsure what, exactly, Sonya wanted to impart to her, but sure it was something private from the expression on her face, Natasha looked around at the many people passing through the hallway. Both women seemed aware that they needed to move out of the hallway, but neither was quite sure where to go, as almost every room was filled to the brim with strange men or a member of the household trying to pack it up.

“The kitchen,” Sonya said finally. “We packed that up first.” Though they did not speak on their way down to the kitchen, each one of them consumed with her own thoughts, Sonya’s hand never left Natasha’s. Finally, arriving in the kitchen, they found it mostly empty, although certain plates and cooking implements still sat on some of the tabletops, afterthoughts that someone might come back for. Seeing this, Natasha and Sonya seemed to have the same thought at once, and pulled one another into the pantry, which was barren of any food except that which would be made up tomorrow morning for breakfast. The spot was nearly as cramped and as dark as the wardrobe in house in their country was, the wardrobe that had been their favorite spot to hide and exchange all their childhood confidences. Each women seemed to realize this, but neither acknowledged it out loud, perhaps afraid to call up such a treasured memory lest the more dire circumstances they found themselves in now tarnish it.

“I’ve got to tell you something,” Sonya said again, but then a worried look came over her face and she said no more.

“What is it?” Natasha asked, clasping both her cousin’s hands in her own as if to urge her to continue.

“The others didn’t want me telling you, and I do worry what the news will do to you, only I can’t imagine if it were me in your place, I feel it’s only right—“ Sonya once again broke off.

“Tell me, tell me!” Natasha said. In her heart, she already anticipated what it was Sonya was about to say, although it seemed so unimaginable to her – both that Andrei might be injured and that he would have found his way back to her in this way.

Sonya seemed to recognize, too, even in the darkness, that Natasha knew. Their childhood understanding of each other had never truly faded; each girl knew the other well enough for much to pass between them without requiring words. And still Sonya felt she had to say it aloud. “It’s Andrei,” she said finally. “He’s here.”

“Oh, Sonya, how bad is it? Do the doctors fear for his life?”

At first, Sonya could only shake her head, although Natasha understood that this was not an assurance of his health but merely Sonya expressing her inability to say more. “Oh, Sonya, I’ve just led the doctors away to get some rest, I would have asked them if only I’d known!”

“I asked earlier,” Sonya said finally. “They think that it’s likely he’ll at least live through the night.”

“Likely?” Natasha said. “So it’s not certain, then.”

Natasha moved to let go of Sonya’s hands, and Sonya could feel in Natasha a restless energy, and knew that she would run to go see him as soon as she was out of Sonya’s grasp. Sonya understood that this was not even a conscious decision on Natasha’s part but merely something she felt she had to do, an instinctual pull that she felt as birds which leave for the winter feel the pull home each summer. Just as Natasha’s fingers slipped away from her own, Sonya reached out and grabbed Natasha’s arm, stopping her. “You can’t go to him now,” she told Natasha. “He’s in a room with many other strange men, and besides that, he needs his rest.”

“Oh, but Sonya, if he should—“ and she did not need to finish her sentence for Sonya to know what she was thinking.

“There’s a priest here, and they didn’t call him to administer last rites,” Sonya assured Natasha. Though neither’s religious devotion was exceptional, this was enough to calm Natasha, at least for the night. “We can go and see him tomorrow,” Sonya said. “Your parents will be so busy with the details of leaving, I’ll be sure to sneak you in. And that way, with the doctors up, we can ask them again how he’s faring.”

“First thing,” Natasha said fiercely. Sonya didn’t promise aloud, only once again clasped Natasha’s hands in hers, but it was as binding for each woman as any oath made before the court. They made their way out of the pantry, then, to see if they could find a room available for them to sleep in. It turned out that though Sonya’s had been given over to the wounded, Natasha’s remained available. Other members of the household were just finishing carrying out boxes of dresses that Natasha had packed earlier when Sonya and Natasha made their way into the room, shutting the door behind them. Both women had the feeling that even if Sonya’s room had been free, they would have spent the night together anyway. They changed into their sleepwear without speaking, and for a few minutes after they’d climbed into bed, neither spoke. Natasha stared out the window at the moon, as she had that first night after she and Andrei had met, although this time it was not with exuberant energy but a silent devotion that she took in its beauty. It seemed to her that there had been a different moon in the sky ever since Andrei had left her, and only now had the true heavenly body been returned to her. Sonya, for her part, lay turned the other way, staring at the wallpaper of the room she had known since childhood and wondering if she would ever see it again after tonight, after the French troops marched in to the city.

Just when both girls had been silent long enough that each wondered if the other was asleep, Sonya said quietly, into the darkness of the room, “Natasha?”

“Yes?” Natasha said, and Sonya, hearing Natasha turning over in bed, turned over herself to look the other woman in the eyes as best she could in the moonlight.

“Are you sure you want to see him?” Sonya said. “What if his feeling toward you is unchanged from what it was when you last saw him? What if he still holds… less than affection for you in his heart?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Natasha said, with that same resolute stubbornness she had possessed ever since she was a child. “It doesn’t matter if he will not speak to me or look at me, and I would be perfectly content it he were to recover and leave this home without ever seeing me again, so long as he recovers. So long as I can lay my eyes on him in case… before he… if he were to…” And she said no more, as though to speak the possibility aloud would be to poison Andrei’s hopes of recovery.

Sonya understood. She understood that to see Andrei would be unspeakably painful for Natasha, but that Natasha could do nothing else, was compelled by everything that was in her soul to see him. She would have to be someone other than herself to be able to know that Andrei was near her and to not go to him. But Sonya knew, also, that Natasha’s was not the meek devotion of some helpless maiden waiting for her man to return from the war. Natasha had always been, strongly, herself. Sonya remembered all the times Natasha had followed her brothers out to go hunting, or tried to take the reins of the sled through the snow, urging the horses to go faster, delighting in the way her breath came out crystalline in the cold. Natasha delighted in the world of things that mostly stood closed to them and available only to men. It was part of this strong spirit that had led her to turn down many proposals since her coming out at sixteen, six years ago, despite her family’s need for the money. Natasha had told her mother that she simply could not compromise all that she was even for those she loved most, her family. Her engagement with Andrei had been not just the promise of love but the hope of access to these other worlds. She had accepted his proposal, out of all that had been made to her, because she saw in him someone who would not ask her to compromise all the fiercest parts of herself.

Everyone knew, of course, about Andrei’s first wife and her tragic early passing. And Sonya knew, too, that Andrei had spoken candidly with Natasha about it, telling her at once how he deeply regretted the loss but also admitting to the mistake of his having married Lise in the first place. He had married her out of societal obligation alone, and had regretted what the marriage had done to both his and her life, even before she had died. Even more, Andrei regretted that he had not valued Lise as an equal. As Lise had died in childbirth but her son had lived, Andrei now had an heir and was freed not just intellectually but logistically from any societal concerns about marrying well. Both Natasha and Andrei had seen in one another an intellectual equal, someone who would challenge their most deeply held notions and awaken them to the world. In loving each other, they had already changed one another, and whether this meeting tomorrow was the start of reconciliation or just a final farewell, Sonya knew that both Andrei and Natasha would carry the other with them for the rest of their lives.

Natasha’s love, then, was one that did not need reciprocation. She loved Andrei for all that he was, yes, and she wanted to be with him again if she could. This was all that Natasha’s family could see; this was why they had wanted Sonya not to tell Natasha of Andrei’s presence in their house. They remembered the decline in her health after Andrei had left the first time and worried that a second refusal would send her back to that state once again. But Sonya knew that Natasha’ decline had been in equal parts a sadness at his leaving, a repentance at her cheating, and a horror at having allowed herself to get swept up in amorous affection for Kuragin, a man who was dashingly handsome but intellectually vacant, one that would have expected Natasha to conform to the meekest model of a wife possible.

Sonya knew that Natasha had been mourning both her betrayal of the relationship and the betrayal of herself, just as Sonya knew that Natasha had recovered her health not because she had let all thoughts of Andrei go, but because she let all thoughts of Kuragin go. Natasha had, in the past year, come back to being the woman who would either love a man that respected her or who would love no man at all, and above all, Natasha loved herself, more than she would every love any man, even Andrei. Seeing Andrei would be a further reconnection for Natasha to who she had been when she had known him most intimately, something which she could carry with her whether he refused her again or not.

And still, yes, Natasha was only human, and she wanted to see Andrei for all these reasons, and she also wanted to see him because he was the man that she loved and he was possibly dying. She wanted to see his eyes and his smile, so hard-won by everyone else but so easily given to her, to hear his voice. And so she said, to Sonya, “Is it silly? The way I feel for Andrei? The way I think I’ll go on feeling it forever, even if I never see him again?”

“No,” Sonya said. “some people fall in love over and over again while some people can only do it once. And I think you’re one of those people who only really does it once.”* There was a pause, and then Sonya added, “And I think Andrei is too.”

“What about—“ Natasha said, pausing before she continued in a whisper, “what about Kuragin, and Lise?”

Sonya shook her head. “It’s not the same. Whether or not he can admit it to himself, we’ll have to see. But he knows it, somewhere deep down, whether or not he says as much tomorrow.”

“Oh, Sonya, I’m so worried,” Natasha said, and after that they said nothing as there was, indeed, much to be worried about, and much unknown. Andrei might have nothing but unkind words or silence to offer, and the city might burn, and Russia might fall, and there was nothing Sonya could say against any of that, but she could hold Natasha’s hand, and so she did, until both of them finally fell asleep.

***

Hunnicutt’s and Pierce were roused early the next morning by an apologetic O’Reilly, who offered them each a breakfast of fresh eggs and coffee. Both men sat up quickly, less affected after a night of heavy drinking than they might have been, as their bodies had long ago gotten used to the excess, and made quick work of the meal, each glad to have something to focus on other than the fact of Hunnicutt’s chin on Pierce’s shoulder when they had awoken. “Well, O’Reilly, what’s the story?” Hunnicutt said. O’Reilly had an apologetic look on his face that both doctors knew well, and each was eager to hear whatever news he had that he knew they wouldn’t like.

“Well, sirs,” he said, “the family has started loading up all of their carts with their belongings, and there are so many boxes that it looks like it won’t be enough room for any of the wounded. And you know that we don’t have any transportation of our own, only with the French on their way and orders for the army not to fight them…”

“Oh, well,” Pierce said bitterly, setting aside his last bit of coffee, “men are expendable but family heirlooms are forever. Really, though, just who is in charge of this? I’m going to speak to that old Count and if he won’t change his mind I’ll start smashing his china myself.” Having slept in his clothes, he wasted no time in getting up and beginning to make his way out of the room.

“Well, I better go with him,” Hunnicutt said as O’Reilly nervously watched them both leave.

When Pierce got down to the entrance hall, though, some of his anger abated, as he found Natasha and the Count already arguing with the Countess. Both were telling her, in their own words, what O’Reilly had relayed minutes before, that the wounded had no means of transportation and that the Rostovs therefore should give up their carriages to the men. As Pierce and Hunnicutt finished making their way down the stairs, it seemed to become clear to Natasha that her impassioned speeches were not working fast enough to sway her mother’s heart, and the two doctors watched as she marched resolutely out the door and over to where the carts were. Through the open door, both her parents and the doctors watched as the small woman climbed up into the back of one of the carts and used all of her leverage to send one of the huge wooden crates that was in it back to the ground. At first, no one moved. The spectacle seemed to have aroused some human decency in the Countess, though, as, after a moment of shock, she began to cry, seemingly not about the disruption but at her own moral depravity. “Of course!” she said. “Of course we must give up our carts to the men! It’s the Russian thing to do! We must help these men who have fought so valiantly for our country!” Then she, too, made her way out toward the carts. Natasha gladly reached out her hand and, when it became clear that the Countess’s clumsiness would require more than just Natasha’s assistance to overcome, the Count himself ran out into the yard to help her up into the cart to better remove all that had been so carefully packed in not an hour ago.

“Well,” Pierce said, turning to Hunnicutt, “it seems like they have things pretty much under control here.”

“Are you sure you don’t still want to go try smashing some china? It looks like they’ve roused themselves into such a mood they might almost find it patriotic,” Hunnicutt said.

“No, I wouldn’t want to be mistaken for a patriot,” Pierce said. The two doctors, both realizing that coordinated the moving of the men out into the yard would be quite the task itself, especially given the amount who need assistance walking or would even need to be carried, left it to the Rostovs to ready the carts and went back up the stairs to the men. They went first to the room where they had left Andrei last night, as Pierce was still worried over the man’s health. They found him, surprisingly, more awake than he had been the night before, if still not entirely aware of his surroundings. When they came into the room he was able, in a complete sentence, to ask for some water, before lapsing into some mumbling about the gospels. “He doesn’t even need us, anymore,” Pierce said, “He wants Father Mulcahy.” Turning to Andrei, he said, “We can get you a bible no problem as long as you promise not to get any ideas into your head about last rites.”

Turning to see if he could see O’Reilly anywhere to send for Father Mulcahy, Pierce was instead surprised to see Hunnicutt standing in the doorway of the room talking quietly to two women, one of whom had just minutes before worked herself into a frenzy over removing all her belongings from the carts. Satisfied that his patient was in good enough health for the time begin, Pierce went over to join the conversation. “Ah, this is Pierce,” Hunnicutt said as he approached, putting an arm on his shoulder. “This is the man that worked on Andrei.” Despite the fact that Hunnicutt was merely relaying a simple fact, the affection in his voice made it was clear to the two women, although perhaps not to Pierce himself, in just how much esteem Hunnicutt held both Pierce and his work.

This admiration, however, was so much a part of Hunnicutt’s life as breathing, that he left no time to dwell on it and immediately continued the conversation, introducing Pierce to the two women and telling him, “It just so happens that Natasha and Sonya here know your patient.” Natasha, who was standing in the doorway next to Hunnicutt, and Sonya, who stood silently but alertly behind her, both looked politely at Pierce, nodding a hello.

Before either of them had time to speak, Pierce said, “Wait. You’re _his_ Natasha?” Ignoring her blush at this statement, he barreled on, “I wish I had this guy’s luck when it came to willing circumstances to go my way.”

“You’d will a woman of your own into the picture?” Hunnicutt said.

“Nah, I’d wish for more carts.” Turning back to Natasha, Pierce said, “You have to admit, it’s downright operatic. I’m just waiting for one of these kids to break out in an aria.” When he saw Natasha and Sonya looking politely but confusedly at him, he added, “Well, well, don’t let my sentiment stop you. Go right on in!”

Pierce stepped a bit out of the way and gestured grandly to the room behind them and the bed where Andrei lay. Natasha, though, seemed to hesitate, looking down at the floor. Sonya, who up till then had been silent, stepped a bit forward and said quietly, “How is he? Will he live?”

“It’s looking more hopeful today,” Pierce said. “Seeing someone he knows might help. The wound itself isn’t that bad, but he’s got a fever and he’s a bit confused. He was asking for you last night, though.”

Natasha snapped her head up at that comment, and a look flashed between the two women that the doctors couldn’t quite read. “He was asking for me?” Natasha repeated.

“Yes, you and the gospels,” Pierce said. Seeing that Natasha looked confused by this last comment, he continued, “Ah, not normally a religious man, is he? Don’t worry, it’ll pass with the fever.” 

It was odd for Pierce to see the woman who had just argued so strongly with her mother and wrested a box twice her size from a cart in a fit of rage now looking so uncertain. The contrast only served to make it all the more clear to the two doctors just how much affection Natasha held in her heart for Andrei. Each man had been working on the front for so long that they had grown desensitized, and they did not often have opportunity to dwell on how news of their patients’ wounds might affect their family. Each man found himself now, instinctively, trying to put himself in the place of Natasha and found that their thoughts turned not to their own families but how they would feel if one another were wounded on the field, to times that they had in fact seen one another hurt. Each man then looked away from the other, afraid his face would reveal every emotion that these images had conjured up for him.

At this thought, and seeing that Natasha was still hesitating, Pierce reached out and touched her arm lightly, saying softly and much more sincerely, “Why don’t you go in? I don’t pretend to know what the relation between the two of you is, but if he was asking for you I know it’ll do him some good to see you. I promise he’s still got the same handsome face he must’ve had when you last saw him.”

This final prompting was enough for Natasha to creep into the room and toward the bed, Sonya following behind her, glancing back gratefully at the doctors as she did. Hunnicutt and Pierce stayed standing in the doorway of the room, wanting to give the women and Andrei some privacy while still making themselves available should a question or medical need arise. “What do you think the story is here?” Hunnicutt whispered to Pierce, leaning his head in toward the other doctor.

“Maybe my patient’s lovesick,” Pierce replied somewhat (although not entirely) sarcastically. “Maybe he restrained himself from a full confession of his feelings before the war, not wanting to leave behind a widow if he were to get shot.”

Hunnicutt raised his eyebrows. “Could be. I think most men tend to try and secure a marriage vow from their sweetheart before running off to war, though, so they know she’ll still be waiting when they get home.”

“Not the most noble, men, thought,” Pierce replied. “The most noble men undergo their love in a stoic and repressed silence, hoping to be wounded in battle and suffer just enough to make them finally worthy of the person of their affections but not so much that it kills them.”

“Well, hopefully our guy has manages to toe that line,” Hunnicutt said. He then grew quiet as Sonya made her way over to them.

“You weren’t just saying that to pacify Natasha?” she asked them once she got closer. “There’s hope that he’ll make it through?”

“Quite a bit of it,” Pierce told her. “If it’s not too forward of me to ask, what are Natasha and Andrei to one another?”

“They were engaged,” Sonya said, “until he broke it off.”

“They don’t look like a couple of ex-fiancés,” Hunnicutt said. The three of them turned their gazes toward Andrei and Natasha, who were talking quietly, their hands clasped.

“It’s a complicated story,” Sonya said. Then, though she would not normally have revealaed the deeply-kept secrets of Natasha’s dalliance with Kuragin to even close friends, let alone strangers, she began to confide to the doctors details of Andrei’s first unhappy marriage, the death of his wife, his meeting Natasha and their subsequent engagement, and Natasha’s affair with Kuragin while Andrei was abroad and the subsequent end to their relationship. Perhaps it was the oddness of the times; the fact that Andrei was still not out of the woods yet with his fever, the fact that Moscow would soon be taken by the French; the fact of Natasha and Andrei reuniting so unexpectedly – in any case, it felt, to her, as if the normal rules of decorum and propriety to which she usually so adhered were of no consequence now.

More than that, though the doctors could not have been much older than Sonya, Andrei, and Natasha – they looked to be in about their early thirties at most – Sonya could not help feeling a kindly and very sincere concern radiating from them. Sonya had lost her own parents when she was so young, and though she had been taken in by the Rostovs, she had always been made keenly aware by both of the Count and Countess (but especially the Countess) that she was not their child by blood, that she was poor, and that she owed them a debt. She felt, in the two minutes she had spent with these men, a glimpse of the sort of true parental concern and affection that she had to this point been missing.

What she wanted, desperately, given the circumstances of great upheaval that surrounded them, was for these two doctors to pour her a cup of tea in the kitchen as she confided in them her own small troubles; but given the very upheaval that made her so long for this, she knew it would not be possible. So she settled, instead, for pouring out the troubles of her beloved Natasha, as they felt closer to the heart of the medical matter of Andrei’s continued fever, a matter that merited some attention even amidst the looming threat of the French on their way to Moscow.

***

While Sonya stood pouring most of her heart out to the doctors, Andrei and Natasha were quietly reuniting. At first, when Natasha had gone over with Sonya beside her, all Andrei had been able to do was to cry out her name, softly, in a tone of disbelief. “Natasha!” he’d said, but he’d looked right through her, as if not believing she was really there.

Sonya, who had gone over believing her cousin might need moral support, saw that though this moment would be hard for both Natasha and Andrei, it was one that they needed to share with each other alone. It was only after Sonya had made her way back over to the doctors that Natasha had found her will to speak and the courage to reach out and take Andrei’s hand. His face was, as the doctor had promised, the same handsome one she had last seen in this very same house a year before. She reached for his hand timidly; although she had no fever of her own to plague her with delusions or cause her to doubt what she saw before her, she still seemed afraid that Andrei could not truly have found his way back to her and that to touch him would be to break the spell. But it did not; his hands were as solid as they ever had been in hers as she said softly, in a voice like Eurydice when Orpheus turned around, “Andrei.”

Indeed, that was what it felt like to both Natasha and Andrei; it felt as though his turning his back on her last year had not been a final farewell at all but a test, and that all this past year they had been walking through the darkness of Hades. The look that passed between them, instead of pulling Andrei further into the land of the living, seemed, at least for the moment, to pull Natasha into the land of the dead. When she had known Andrei, though he was a widower and she perhaps too old to still be unmarried, they had both nevertheless felt young. The Andrei she had known had been sure of himself and his place in the world and how he might find meaning in it. When she had turned from him to Kuragin, however briefly, he had lost that assuredness. What Natasha was seeing, now, was not just the specter of death that had followed Andrei off the battlefield but also all the uncertainties that had long haunted him ever since the day they had last spoken.

Neither of them spoke much now; Andrei, though he seemed to realize after a while that it was truly Natasha before him, was still battling his fever and his resulting worries about diluting divine love in his love of Natasha. And Natasha, for her part, was overwhelmed by Andrei’s presence, by all that she saw in his face, and by the question of what he was feeling and what she was feeling and what this meant for their future, if indeed Andrei would have a future – all of this so crowded her thoughts that she found herself unable to say much.

It was Andrei who broke the silence. He said simply, “I dreamed you were here.”

“I’ve dreamed about you most nights this year,” Natasha told him.

“Let’s keep dreaming,” Andrei said, closing his eyes, and Natasha was unsure if he was still aware of her, although he did not let go of her hands.

Hunnicutt and Pierce, for their part, found themselves strangely moved by the sight of Natasha and Andrei across the room and by Sonya’s impassioned telling of her cousin’s story. Having been on the battlefield so long, it had been quite a while since they had witnessed tender romance. And perhaps, given how many wounded they had worked on just yesterday, and how uncertain they still were about the fate of many of these patients, especially given the upcoming journey out of the city, they needed this small, human concern of young love to distract them from the seemingly inhuman violence and death they had borne witness to so recently. And perhaps each man still held in the back of his mind the memory of the previous night and the talk of a home with a garden, and, believing the exchange had carried less weight for the other than it had for himself, each man needed to both distract himself from and indulge himself in the fantasy of love that was so outside himself, this operatic and beautiful young couple who had found each other again just when they most needed to.

They were moved, too, by how obviously Sonya cared for Natasha and, by extension, for Andrei. Just as Sonya sensed in them the potential of that parental love she had sorely missed, they seemed to sense in her someone that needed taking care of, and that was what they did; they took care of people. And so, once she finished her story, they began to ask her all sorts of questions about the matter. They became so wrapped up in concern about the fate of this couple whose acquaintance they had just made that they entirely forget about the imminent capture of the capitol city by the French. O’Reilly had to come track them down, clearly startling all three of them – Hunnicutt, Pierce, and Sonya – when he entered the room, and he apologized before adding, “Only, I thought you might want to start helping the men into the carts.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Pierce said, both he and Hunnicutt immediately jumping to attention.

Sonya went and led Natasha away from Andrei’s side, reminding her that her parents would worry if she was gone for too long or accompanied Andrei on the journey. “Remember how bad you were last year, darling, it’s just that they want what’s best for you and don’t realize like I do how things have changed for you since then.”

“You’ll take care of him?” Natasha said to Pierce as she was led out of the room.

“He’s in the best hands,” Hunnicutt assured her, smiling, before turning to the bedside of a wounded soldier to ascertain if he could move without assistance. Before too long, all the wounded, as well as the Rostovs and the medical staff, had been loaded in the carts, along with a few boxes of the Rostov’s most essential possessions. And then, without much fanfare, the group began, along with many other citizens of the cities and wounded soldiers, to make their way out of the capitol and leave it for the French to claim.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Yes this is pretty much a direct quote from the forth book in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series. Was that shit with Lena and Kostos not the most romantic thing you’d ever read when you were like thirteen??? You know you’re a good writer when people remember your books more than ten years after they read them and look up the quote so they can put it in their M*A*S*H/War and Peace fanfiction.
> 
> Thanks for reading the second chapter! I know it was a bit longer than a week between these first two chapters, but I got unexpectedly busy last week, so the third one should actually be up within the week this time. Very excited for what's in store for BJ & Hawkeye :) Also, I don't have anyone editing for me because, uh, none of my friends are interested in M*A*S*H/War & Peace fanfic (shocking), so though I try to go over it myself a few times please excuse any typos/grammatical errors etc!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Make your decision now / rely on no help from above / living is luxury / I want it, everything that you throw out / I’ll do anything you want to /… / I want it, everything that you throw out / there must be something you could do without / … / I’m as happy as sin in a fear-shaken world” – “As Sure As I Am” by Crowed House

Pierce and Hunnicutt traveled in the cart with the men who were in the most critical condition so as to keep an eye on them, and so Andrei was among them. Father Mulcahy went along with them too, in case he might (God forbid) have to administer last rites to someone when they were on the road. Although none of their patients seemed in imminent danger of dying, he still found it best not to take chances. At first the journey seemed hard on Andrei, who remained in and out of consciousness; it was only after many hours on the road, as it was almost dark, that he finally seemed to come to. The first thing he did upon waking up was to turn to the person closest to him, Pierce, and to ask, again, for a copy of the gospel.

“Father, we’ve got one of your newly religious types right here,” Pierce said. Father Mulcahy was happy to oblige, and Pierce clambered over Mulcahy somewhat clumsily so that Mulcahy could have better access to the patient. After nearly ending up in Hunnicutt’s lap, Pierce managed to right himself and proceeded to half-listen to Mulcahy’s conversation with the patient, half joke with Hunnicutt.

“I hear you’ve been asking for the gospel,” Father Mulcahy said to Andrei.

“Yes, father,” Andrei said with a reverence he had never before afforded any sort of religious person.

Mulcahy produced his Bible, which he always carried with him, and handed it over to the patient. “May I ask why you’ve been asking for the gospel? Of course it’s always good to turn to God in times of hardship, but I have been informed that you were not a particularly religious man before now. I wonder what it is that’s in your heart now.”

“It’s all become clear to me,” Andrei said, taking the Bible gladly from Father Mulcahy and clutching it to his chest, seemingly grateful for the mere physicality of the book even without having read any of what was inside.

“What has?” Father Mulcahy asked. Looking into Andrei’s eyes, Mulcahy could see that they still glimmered as if with some sort of fever, although according to the doctors, the man was doing much better.

“All of it,” Andrei said. “Divine love.”

“Divine love,” Mulcahy repeated, laughing a little, although not unkindly.

“I felt it, after they brought me back from the battlefield, after my injury. There was a man in the tent who… I knew him from my former life,” Andrei said, for it seemed to Andrei that all that had happened before that day, before his injury and subsequent spiritual transformation, had indeed taken place in another lifetime, that he had been another man then. “I knew him in my former life, and had harbored great resentment toward him. But in an instant, in the tent, I forgave him. It was the easiest thing in the world.”

“That sounds like quite the transformative moment,” Mulcahy said. “And God is glad for all who find their way to him, no matter when or how. But, forgive me for saying this – you still seem troubled to me. I wonder if something still besieges you? Is your wound causing you discomfort?”

“My wound is nothing,” Andrei said, and indeed his voice sounded stronger as he said it than it had all day. He looked past Mulcahy, to where Pierce sat, and asked, “Is she with us still?”

Pierce tore himself away from the conversation with Hunnicutt and said, “Natasha? Yes, she’s up in first class.”

“Ah, so it’s a woman,” Mulcahy said knowingly.

Andrei’s eyes darkened. “Yes,” he said. “This is what is troubling me. I am weak. There is a woman who I was engaged to, who then hurt me, and who I hurt in return. I had not seen her for… a while since then. But she was there, this morning…” he reached out, then, and took Mulcahy’s hand in his own, keeping the Bible in his other, as if words alone were insufficient to convey what he wished to say next.

“Father, after the battle, I experienced such love as I have never known. God’s love. Divine love. That kind of love… it is indiscriminant, it is without limits. My sister, Marya, she has always been a good Christian, she has always had faith in God’s love. You will forgive me if I tell you I did believe. I could not even comprehend what it was I did not believe in. But I felt it, that day. It was what allowed me to forgive Kuragin. Feeling this love, it brought my thoughts back to her. To this woman… Natasha. But a divine love, to be so without limits, must necessarily make no distinctions between people. It is not earned, it just is, and will be even after we die. And so it is greater than us and anything we do. To feel, as I do, so strongly toward one woman, is to tarnish that great love, to force it to be something smaller than it is. If I choose to go back to Natasha, now, I fear I will sever my connection to that divine love completely, and go back to what I was before I knew it. But if I shun her, well… Father, forgive me, but I don’t know if I can live without her.”

“That’s quite a lot to be wrestling with,” Father Mulcahy said, crossing one leg over the other and putting the hand which was not holding Andrei’s on his own knee. For a long minute or two, he did not say anything, but, if anything, the silence made Andrei more, not less, comfortable. The silence they sat in was one that only truly devout priests, or old women, can cultivate. It was a dynamic silence, one which made Andrei feel sure Mulcahy had heard him and was contemplating his words sincerely. Next to them, even Pierce and Hunnicutt had fallen silent; both were tired from yesterday’s hard work and the little sleep they had gotten last night, and in the growing twilight, Pierce had begun to doze off, or at least he seemed to, his head resting on Hunnicutt’s shoulder, Hunnicutt smiling down affectionately at him.

In truth, though both men were tired, both remained awake still and listened intently to the conversation between Father Mulcahy and Andrei. It was only when Pierce and Hunnicutt were at their most vulnerable, exhausted to the point where they no longer had the energy to keep up their defenses or had the excuse of being not quite aware of their actions, that they truly allowed themselves to not just lean into but to truly find shelter in the other, to rest their head on the other’s shoulder without pulling it away and throwing out a joke to dilute the sincerity of all it was that the gesture meant to them. And it was true Pierce was exhausted now, his body drained, but he had worked in the war long enough that two days of hard work with a chance to sleep in-between was nothing – he could have stayed awake the whole night through if it had been required. But more than physical exhaustion, he felt something else in himself depleted.

The sharing of a bed with Hunnicutt, so close to what he wanted but yet so different, having to hold all the threads of his desire taut within himself the whole night through – and then today, hearing the story of the young couple, seeing how freely they took one another’s hand despite whatever supposed estrangement Sonya had spoken of – all of it accumulated in Pierce’s soul so that he allowed himself now this appearance of exhaustion, this feigned sleep so he could lean into Hunnicutt without leaning away. Pierce was so deluded in chiding himself for his weakness in wanting this other man that he couldn’t tell how gratefully Hunnicutt himself leaned into Pierce as soon as the man’s head came to rest on his shoulder, how much Hunnicutt, too, needed this moment of physical connection across the words they could not say.

The priest and Andrei, however, were caught up in their own conversation and paid the doctors no mind – besides the fact that both Mulcahy and Andrei were deeply invested in their conversation, there was truly no outward sign from either of the doctors that might have alerted anyone else to the inner turmoil each experienced. “You know, Andrei,” Mulcahy said finally. “May I call you Andrei?”

“Yes, of course, Father,” Andrei said, feeling already a bond of deep kinship with Mulcahy.

“It is not unusual for men to experience spiritual revelations on the battlefield,” Mulcahy continued. “But feelings of spiritual ecstasy are not something any but the most spiritually strongest among us can maintain for long. It’s true that it is admirable to watch monks give up the world, but we do not recommend just any man for the monastery. Most of us are weak, even priests, and to try and maintain that connection to God would be to invite the devil into our hearts. Even priests are allowed to marry, Andrei. To be on this earth and to be separate from God, that, of course, is suffering. But marriage is the most divine suffering. Loving someone is the most messy, _human_ thing we can do, Andrei. And so, by God, we should do it. Leave the divine love for after death. God wants you on this earth, with us, now, and the best way to be on this earth and be fully apart of it is by loving other humans.”

“Thank you, father,” Andrei said, though he did not feel Mulcahy’s word in his heart. He thought, intellectually, that everything the priest had said was good and true, but he could not help feeling, deep in his soul, some internal conflict lingering, some longing in him to see that other world, to stay within that divine love forever, a love which was indiscriminant and so did not induce in him the suffering that came along with loving another and having to care why, to care if that love was returned, to care to see her smile and to hurt if she was not with him. He wanted a love that encompassed the whole world, to be able to walk down the road penniless and far from home and smile at each stranger he passed and have that be enough for him without searching for _her_ smile in every face. He didn’t want to _want_. And yet he did.

“Well,” Mulcahy said, but did not continue, instead smiling kindly at Andrei. He seemed to sense that there remained in the other man’s soul some confusion, but he knew when to let it be, when there was something that a person had to work out for themselves.

Hunnicutt and Pierce, for their part, each felt like they were children again, when they had feigned sleep to see what it was the grownups said without them. Andrei’s world was as inaccessible to them now as the world of grownups had been many years ago – to speak so freely of love to a priest, to voice out loud all that he wrestled with, to give it a name, to ask questions of it, seemed inconceivable to the doctors. But each of them identified with one sentiment that Mulcahy had expressed – that of love as suffering.

Each of the four men became lost in their own thoughts, and by the time the carts had found a small village to rest in for the night, Pierce and Hunnicutt’s feigned sleep had almost become real. Still, as soon as they felt the motion of the cart cease beneath them and saw the huts in which they would stay, each man sprang to action immediately. Along with O’Reilly and Mulcahy, they coordinated the unpacking of beds, the moving of the sick from the carts to the huts, and so forth. Natasha, for her part, had told her parents during the journey that she knew Andrei was among the wounded, that she had spoken to him, and that she intended to do so again. Her mother had begun to worry almost immediately, crying about wanting what was best for Natasha, and so, upon disembarking from the carriage in the evening, Natasha had not so much as glanced at the men, resolving instead to visit Andrei after her mother was asleep. 

Eventually, Mulcahy and O’Reilly made their way out of the huts where the wounded were sheltered and into another to find rest for the night. But Pierce and Hunnicutt stayed on, checking all the patients and insuring that being on the road all day had not undone a stitch or worsened a fever.

Andrei had been housed with other wounded for days now, but he had not, till this night, possessed the cognizance to observe what was going on around him. Both his wounds, the resulting fever, and his own religious and personal turmoil had kept him locked fully in his interior world. But now, both Pierce’s tireless work on his wounds and Father Mulcahy’s talk with him on the carts had served to soothe him enough that he could take in what it was that was around him. One of the cottages in which the wounded were being kept shared a wall and a door with the room in which the Rostovs themselves were staying. Pierce and Hunnicutt were in such a state trying to coordinate each man finding a bed that neither was sure, once things had settled down, which of them (if either of them indeed had) had made sure to put Andrei in this room, closer to his beloved, but they found, once they had settled into the more routine task of checking temperatures and bandages, that this positioning of Andrei had indeed, somehow, been accomplished.

Andrei, for his part, did not seem to realize this, or maybe it was merely that, as torn as his still remained over what to do about his love for her, he put it out his mind. Hunnicutt and Pierce, for their part, both avoided the man as they would touching a wound, afraid that to speak to Andrei would be to call up all the emotions his young love affair with Natasha had conjured for them in Moscow that morning. He was obviously doing better, and had been even in the carts, and so they busied themselves with other patients, leaving him for last. This left Andrei, for his part, with nothing to do but observe these two doctors, one of whom had saved his life.

Hunnicutt and Pierce didn’t speak much as they worked; not in crisis and not in the operating room, they seemed to want to be respectful to the men whom they were tending to and to have fallen into an almost meditative state of doing medicine. Still, they would pass comments back and forth from time to time, asking one another for their medical opinion on one man’s dressing or another’s pallor. It was obvious to Andrei, as it was to almost anyone who took the time to observe them for any length of time, that there was something _more_ that existed in the relationship between the two doctors even than even the usual tight comradery which formed between men on the battlefield.

They worked in such synchronicity as to be almost one; Andrei watched as one man expressed what was seemingly, to him, only a half-formed thought, a parentheses, an incomplete sentence, but the other doctor always leapt immediately onto his colleague’s meaning, following the thought through long past where Andrei could parse meaning out of the spoken words that passed between them. Further, they seemed, even when silent, to be always leaned slightly toward one another; even across the room, it seemed to Andrei that they kept their heads or shoulders slightly turned in the direction of the other, always aware of where the other was.

Such a co-dependence might have seemed, in another instance, a hindrance. Andrei thought, with a sharp stab of regret, how he had spoken with friends back in Petersburg about the institution of marriage (back when he was newly engaged to Lise), warning them against it, wishing to extricate himself from its obligations whenever possible. In Hunnicutt and Pierce he saw not the dangers of binding one’s life to another’s but the potential joys of it. Though Andrei could not understand most of what they said, it was clear to him that everything they were doing in this room was in the care of the people around them, their patients and each other. He watched as men sighed in relief after they consulted one another on the best antidote for varied pains. Even in the heaviness of what it was they were doing, there seemed to exist something light between them. Something with a solid weight, but which served to ease the burden of the blood and suffering in the room nonetheless.

Seeing this felt, for the first time, like seeing a model of what his relationship with Natasha might be like, a model that felt good and right and not something to avoid. He was scared, he had to admit, of his love for her, in part because he had not loved Lise and she had not loved him and then she had died and he had to carry the burden of that on his conscience for the rest of his life. His parents, and most of the couples he knew in high society back home – all of them seemed to build the foundations of their marriages on something other than mutual respect, to endure and to try to pull what they wanted out of the other. Here was a relationship where everything was given freely, and without having to ask, where each man worked not just in the service of the other but in greater service to humanity as a whole because of what it was that existed between them.

And it was due to this harmony which Andrei noticed in the doctors that Hunnicutt was able to perceive a subtle agitation in Pierce that Andrei was unable to perceive. At first Hunnicutt let the other man alone, hoping that allowing Pierce to consume himself in his work would be a balm for whatever it was that might be troubling him. But Hunnicutt watched as checking each patient seemed to be doing nothing to calm Pierce’s nerves but in fact seemed to make him jumpier. Andrei’s observations were not wrong; despite his agitation, Pierce was still managing to enact small miracles of healing which might have eluded other doctors. Still, Hunnicutt perceived some emotion stronger than usual beneath Pierce’s usually doctor-ly mannerisms and, going over to Pierce to touch him gently on the shoulder said, “Why don’t you go find out where exactly it is we’re supposed to stay tonight? I can finish up here.”

Pierce shot Hunnicutt some sort of side-long look and replied, “Why are you trying to chase me out of post-op? I want to finish looking at my patients.”

Hunnicutt flashed Pierce his most winning smile and said, “I just want you to make sure they’ve still got a place for us at the inn.” Hunnicutt had offered what he hoped was a benign and believable excuse to chase Pierce from the room because he knew he couldn’t tell the other man that he looked tired and needed to rest. Of course, Hunnicutt said this not knowing that the source of Pierce’s agitation was Hunnicutt himself, or rather, Pierce’s feelings in relation to Hunnicutt – the leftover emotions resulting from their night shared in the bed together, all the small bits that could not be contained within the usual steel trap of his mind, where he caught things and kept them, trapped there hurting within his quick wit; these bits of emotion, combined with Mulcahy and Andrei’s talk of love in the aftermath of the burning of a city, all left Pierce unable to feel completely at ease around Hunnicutt. And this agitated him even more, for Hunnicutt was usually the only thing on earth which could set him at ease.

And so of course, into this simple excuse of Hunnicutt’s, Pierce read something not at all intentioned, an implication that Hunnicutt had been distressed by the previous night, that he wanted Pierce to insure they each had their own separate bed that night. Pierce felt the familiar guilt rising up in him, that of wanting something from people that which they did not want to give (although even Andrei, an almost perfect stranger to the men, could have told Pierce that this perception of the relationship was flawed), and acting on that guilt, told Hunnicutt, “Of course. I’ll go find O’Reilly and tell him to find management and make sure we have king-sized beds at least tonight.”

Hunnicutt, sensing that something he had said had put Pierce off but unsure what it was, did he best to slip back into the banter that was so familiar to them, in the hopes of smoothing things over. “Ask them for the bridal suite if it’s available, dear.”

“Of course,” Pierce replied, almost on instinct, looking distracted as he made his way out of the room and Hunnicutt turned to tend to the last few patients.

***

Having finished with all the other patients, Hunnicutt went at last to Andrei. With Pierce out of the room, Hunnicutt found it easier to meet Andrei as merely the man he was and not the symbol of something Hunnicutt could not have; this change in his perception of the man made it distinctly pleasant for him to sit and talk with Andrei, as any time he was granted the opportunity to talk with one of the men Pierce had operated on, to witness in their conversation not just the flesh of the man but the full depth of the human life that Pierce had saved, it brought him some small spark of joy and comfort in a war that often offered little of either.

As he checked Andrei’s bandages and temperature and found both satisfactory, Hunnicutt asked him affectionately, “How are you feeling today, soldier? How’re the twin crises of religion and love treating you?” as one might ask their nephew about his grades at school or his new puppy.

Andrei smiled at Hunnicutt, but it was a restrained smile. Though he had, just moments earlier, been bolstered by the inherent goodness of the love between the doctors, he found himself wavering again in his resolve to offer himself once again to Natasha. “I wonder if I might ask you something, doctor,” he said. “Something not strictly medical.”

“Sure,” Hunnicutt said, sitting down at the edge of Andrei’s bed, “although Mulcahy tends to be better with the more existential questions. I’m just a glorified seamstress.”

Andrei shook his head briefly as if to dismiss Hunnicutt’s self-deprecation and continued on, saying, “You’re not new to war, are you?

“No,” Hunnicutt said. “I served the first time we fought Napoleon, too. They keep changing up the rules of war on us. I thought once you knocked a bastard to the mat the match was over, but apparently not so much anymore.”

“So you’ve seen much of the worst of what the war can do? You’ve seen the boys who die young and for no reason?”

Hunnicutt had no jokes for this, and merely nodded.

Andrei continued, “Do you ever feel like something… pulled you into this war? Like you’re on a track and you can’t stop it? Like this war had to happen?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” Hunnicutt replied, not unkindly but firmly. “This war makes the least sense to me out of anything that I’ve ever seen. I can’t see thinking it _had_ to happen.”

“That’s exactly what I mean, though,” Andrei said, sitting up a little more in bed and reaching out as if to grasp the doctor’s collar in a passion before remembering himself and sinking back a little as he continued, “I went into this war to escape the banalities of high society. I found women’s concerns trivial and I thought men were made in the heat of battle under the leadership of great generals. I was nineteen when we first fought Napoleon, a child. I seized my chance to serve and was glad to take it. But now that I’m here, I see the generals are cowardly or, worse, stupid to the point of gross incompetence that causes unnecessary loss of life. They lay out plans with no relevance to the men on the field. And the men die, every day, for nothing. I can’t see any way to make sense of it. Why should we all fight, and die, in the thousands? The only way I can think to see any sense to it now is to see some greater law, something above humans that compels us to it.”

Hunnicutt shook his head and for a minute said nothing. This was not the first time a soldier had asked him to make sense of the war for him. Each time he had to fight the urge to run from the room and call for Father Mulcahy. Oftentimes, he gave in, and found this act not cowardly but in fact the best option for all involved. He could make sense of the minutia of the war; he could look into a man and know what didn’t fit, pick the shrapnel from the organs, stitch a wound so it wouldn’t scar as much as it might have otherwise; he could rightly perceive the place for the needle in flesh. But what he could not make sense of was the place of any man in the army, even his own, if he allowed himself long to think about it, which he usually did not. There was vodka to take care of that problem, a balm which he prescribed to himself liberally. But sometimes, with a patient like this, who had hovered so long in death’s door and who Hunnicutt felt still might slip out the back way if he turned around for too long – Hunnicutt felt he owed these men something, even if it were merely his own vulnerability in admitting that he didn’t know either what this all meant, this killing and this dying.

“Maybe we are all just stuck in some sort of track,” Hunnicutt said finally. “Maybe we’re all being pulled toward some inevitable _something_ , but it can’t be violence and it can’t be death. It just can’t be. Even if that were true, we can’t let ourselves believe it. I think the only way to survive this war, to not let it kill you, is to let it keep not making sense. Don’t try to fit it into some schema, into something that makes sense to you. This isn’t ‘a man’s world’ any more than the trivial bits of high society you found so repulsive are a ‘woman’s world.’ You love that woman, Natasha, don’t you?” At the question, something flashed in Andrei’s eyes, some sharp indignance and gladness all at once, to hear it spoken of now, by this doctor he hardly knew, but he merely nodded, allowing Hunnicutt to continue speaking.

“So you love Natasha,” Hunnicutt said. “And if you really love her, you must see something in her beyond her ‘woman’s role.’” Andrei nodded. Hunnicutt continued, “So let that guide you. Let that show you how to make something more for yourself too. Don’t let this war make you a man. Let love make you human. I don’t think there’s much in this world to make meaning from, and to tell you the truth, I don’t think there’s a place in the world for most of us to fit into. But I think do think we fit with people. If you’re being pulled toward anything, let it be her. Let yourself be pulled toward some small good thing, not some grand violence. Let her be your good thing.”

“Is it selfish?” Andrei asked the doctor quietly. “To keep living for her? Just for her?”

If Hunnicutt had asked himself the question, he would’ve said yes. In fact, he had asked himself the question, again and again, in the times when he felt weakest, and he had answered, again and again, _Yes. Yes it is selfish to keep living just for him._ But hearing it come from Andrei, from this young soldier who Pierce had stitched back together himself, it gave Hunnicutt the grace to say simply, and to mean it as he said it: “No. It’s not selfish. It’s human.”

He could feel it then, a strange clarity that settled into his lungs like winter air that hurts even as you want to take more of it in. Andrei had had his moment of revelation on the battlefield, almost dead from his wounds looking up at the open sky above him, and Pierre had taken his revelation from the comet in the sky above his carriage in the city, but Hunnicutt found his here, on earth, in quiet conversation after the scalpel had been set down and no one was bleeding anymore. He could see, then, clearly, how the only thing that had ever made any sense in this war, to him, was Pierce. He could see that if he had been pulled toward any small good thing in his life it was that one man. It was all he could do not to leap up right then, to run out of the room right to the man himself, to take him by the shoulders and shake it out of him: _Do you love me too? Do you?_

But the doctor stayed where he was, with his patient, though he still felt that sharp, piercing clarity within him all the while. There was a raw need in him, suddenly – well, it was one that had always been there, but now was exposed, painful and all his own, something this war couldn’t take from him, something that he would carry his whole life. And he would have been content, till now, to carry it with him silently to the grave. It would’ve been enough just to have it, to know that it was his.

But now that wasn’t enough. As he spoke with Andrei a bit more, reassuring him and patting his hand and doing all that good doctors did, he could see only that he needed something more, now. He needed, he _wanted_ something that would last beyond this war, to reach out for meaning beyond himself, for he had found no meaning within his own soul. What he saw in Pierce was not meaning itself but the way toward meaning. He needed not the question and not the answer but the space between the question and the answer, the air that hung between two people that had decided to ask something of each other, selfishly.

***

Pierce made his way out of the cottage and went in search of O’Reilly or Mulcahy. Sticking his head into one of the few cottages which had not been requisitioned for the men, he found the Rostovs. Though Pierce sighted Natasha in the back of the small room, her face dark with emotion, it was her mother (the Countess) who answered the door, and Pierce felt it best not to call out to the younger woman or inquire as to how she was. Instead, he merely let himself be directed by the Countess to the room next door and made his way to find O’Reilly and Mulcahy settled down but not sleeping. He saw that there were, in fact, two beds free in the room this time.

“Well, BJ sent me sort everything out, but it seems everything is pretty well sorted,” Pierce announced to the two other men. Then, instead of settling himself in at all, he began to pace the room, wanting to go back to tending the patients in order to take his mind off things he thought it should not linger on, but not wanting to disturb the man who had sent him away, the very one who so consumed his thoughts.

At first, Mulcahy and O’Reilly did their best to ignore the doctor, as they were not unused to small disruptions to their space by him, but as time went by and it became clear he had no intentions of quieting himself, Mulcahy spoke up and said, “Hawkeye, you know how it gets to Radar when you pace like that.”

“Well I’ve got a lot to think about and you know how good I am at thinking on my feet.”

Mulcahy just sighed at that, though Radar, who was lying on his bed still fully in uniform, looked up from a book he seemed to have acquired from the Count at some point and said, “Oh, it’s all right, Father.” Still, he did look somewhat distressed. When Radar had finished helping with the wounded and had gone to the Count to ask about accommodations for himself, the priest, and the doctors, he had unfortunately found the Count in a moment of distress. The Count was trying to reconcile himself to the loss of Moscow and the loss of his own house within the city. To reconcile himself to these loses, he needed to say all kinds of half-formed philosophical observations out loud, statements which he had never previously believed or even pondered, but which seemed to him now the most important of all sentiments. He needed to say them aloud to another person, and to have that other person nod and agree, and unfortunately for the young soldier, O’Reilly happened to make his appearance at the Count’s side just as the Count had begun to look around for someone that would listen to him.

And so the Count had brushed aside all question of a room or a bed, and had, for quite some time, talked to O’Reilly about the superiority of the country, and how it was on the backs of farmers that Russia was built and maintained, and so it was not her heart that had been burned last night, that Moscow had already been an empty shell of intellectual thought for the sake of intellectual thought and that it was, after all, not opera but bread that the people needed, and how now more than ever it was important for them to turn to the country and to the land.

O’Reilly, trying his best to extricate himself from the conversation, had said, apologetically, “Oh, I’m sorry sir, I don’t know much about all that.” But, instead of taking this as a sign to stop assailing the poor man with his sentiments, the Count had instead started telling O’Reilly that he had much to learn, and searched around in a huff for the books that he had managed to take with him, looking for something to give O’Reilly. Finally, he had managed to locate a small box and handed O’Reilly a technical volume concerning the best agricultural science known to date regarding things such as soil composition. Handed such a book in another context, O’Reilly might’ve immediately disregarded its contents, but the more the Count talked, the more his anxiety fueled the young soldier’s, and the more O’Reilly began to feel that the count was right and the best thing that O’Reilly himself could do for his country was to take and read and understand the volume.

He had been struggling with the book for the last hour, and Pierce’s pacing was not helping. Had Pierce known any of this, or had the clarity of mind to take a good look at anything outside himself for a second, he would have taken the book from O’Reilly immediately and set everything to rights. As it was, he simply kept pacing, causing O’Reilly to tell Father Mulcahy, softly and almost apologetically, “I’m going to go read out by the fire with some of the boys,” the boys being the wounded soldier well enough to still be talking and drinking outside as night fell. Still Pierce didn’t seem to realize fully what was happening with the other people in the room; Mulcahy, for his part, recognized well the agitated state Pierce was in and thought it best if O’Reilly _did_ leave the room, if only so that he might try to speak to the doctor privately.

And so, once O’Reilly had made his way out, Mulcahy went up and grabbed Pierce’s arm, firmly but warmly, physical touch being the only thing that would rouse Pierce out of his state of irritation enough to engage in real conversation with another person. “Come on, Hawkeye,” Mulcahy said. “What’s all this about?”

“Can I ask you something, Father? But only if you promise not to go too ‘God’ on me,” Pierce said.

Mulcahy laughed a little. “I was put in this army to serve people of all religious denominations, even the Unitarians. I’m well used to your little aversion to God by now. I don’t mind it.”

“Well, all right, then.” But then, instead of saying anything, Pierce continued to pace. After a bit more of this he finally stopped on the far end of the room from Mulcahy, turning around to face him as he said, “Did you mean what you said, back there in the cart?”

“Well, yes, I’m sure I did. I try not to speak insincerely with the wounded. But to what in particular are you referring, Hawkeye?”

“That part, what you said, above love being suffering.”

At this, Mulcahy furrowed his brow. “Well, I think you’re taking it a bit out of context when you put it that way.”

“But that’s what you said, isn’t it? That love is suffering?”

“What’s all this about, Hawkeye? I can talk philosophy with you all day and it won’t solve anything if you don’t tell me what you really mean. Are you really so hung up on this young couple? I’m sure they’ll work it out.”

“It’s not about them, father.”

“Well, what is it about, then?”

“I’ve just been feeling lousy, is all. I’ve been feeling lousy this whole god damn war.”

“Well, who among us hasn’t, really. I don’t see what that’s got to do with love, though,” Mulcahy replied.

“Well, that’s just the thing, though, isn’t it. This whole war has been making me feel lousy, it’s built to drive you insane. The only thing keeping me sane is one person. It’s selfish. It’s selfish how much I need him. And he doesn’t feel the same. And then _that_ makes me feel crazy, like I was built to love people that don’t love me back. Like I was built for suffering. But if, well, if love is suffering, then maybe I’m not doing it wrong, maybe that’s just how miserable human existence is, but in that case, why do we keep going? It’s selfish to love someone this much and it’s selfish to care how he feels in return and it’s selfish…” But Pierce trailed off, unable to finish his thought, instead resorting to returning to his anxious pacing around the room, as if by moving through space he might find some new way out of his problem, as if his thoughts hovered somewhere concretely in the room and were therefore avoidable if he moved around them just right.

“Hawkeye, I…” Father Mulcahy started, paused, then began again. “We need other people to survive. I didn’t say love was suffering, I said it was divine suffering. It’s suffering because it keeps us from God, to care so much about this mortal world, but He gave us this world and it’s also the best thing we can do while we’re here. And if you don’t… I know you don’t believe in Him, which makes love the only thing you _can_ believe in and the highest good in your life. It’s not selfish to need people. What’s selfish is to keep love to yourself.”

“It’s selfish to keep something to yourself if you know another person wants it. But this person… it’s not something he wants. I don’t want to burden him with it.”

“Hawk… may I ask, respectfully, just who, exactly, this person is?” Mulcahy said. Up until now, he had been under the impression that Pierce already did, in fact, possess the love of another man, that Pierce and Hunnicutt were a couple who merely preferred to keep much of their love private and away from the public eye. Pierce’s distress indicated to him that this was not the case, and now Mulcahy, finding his previous assumptions to be so wrong, was unsure quite how to continue in the conversation delicately enough so as to not upset more the already quite upset doctor.

“No, father, respectfully, you may not,” Pierce told him.

After a minute wherein the room was filled only with sounds of Pierce’s continued pacing, Mulcahy said, “Hawkeye, I think – and I say this not just as a priest who believes in the divine love that God has to offer us all at even our darkest times, but also as merely a man, your friend, someone who has seen the good work you do and the way you are with the other men – I think the world has more love waiting for you than you think. I think you just have to be brave enough to ask for it.”

Twin impulses wrestled within Pierce. There was the first impulse, the stronger, as it was the way he was used to letting his thoughts go – for an irreligious man, he strongly possessed the monastic qualities of self-denial and repentance. Both instincts came so naturally to him that many holy men who had worked their whole lives toward enlightenment would have felt that great sin of jealous rearing up in them had they known how deeply the impulse lay in Pierce’s heart. But there was also now within the man a new impulse, oddly arisen in one of the bleaker experiences of his life; there was an impulse toward hope.

Everything Andrei had expressed, all the Father Mulcahy had tried to tell him, the almost sincere way Hunnicutt seemed to talk about the rose garden, the bridal suite… all of it was enough for there to flicker in Pierce a small flame, a delicate hope which wavered but continued to burn, that he might ask, one day, for something he wanted, that if he were to unlock all the parts of himself he had for so long kept shuttered – but all these moments which told him he might be allowed to want could not undo the lifetime of tamping down everything that burned most strongly within him, the passions for human connection which he so often denied himself. The flame did not die, but it did not burn away all else that remained in his soul, and so, more confused than ever, Pierce found himself turning away from Mulcahy. “Thank you, father,” he said. “Really. I’m just going out for a walk. I’ve got to clear my head.”

“Hawkeye – “ Mulcahy called, but Pierce was already making his way out the door and headed, unknowingly, straight in the direction of Hunnicutt returning from his own talk of love with Andrei.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone is interested, [here is a link](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/39XmRH0KX3bTWed3NkUSdK?si=e8QcWF8TSS2JI8FgbY4V7A) to the spotify playlist I made about these two doctors and which I listened to while writing this chapter until I made myself feel too unhinged and had to stop. Do you ever think about when Talking Heads said “I can’t tell one from the other, if I found you or you found me” or when Sufjan Stevens said “when you crochet I feel mesmerized and proud” or when Crowded House said, “I want it, everything you throw out / there must be something you can do without”? Do you ever listen to “Folks on the Hill” and think about Hawkeye & BJ as an old couple living in a cottage together and feel yourself becoming unglued? Do you ever listen to a CRJ song & consider its valences in light of Hawkeye & BJ’s codependency and alcoholism? That and more is in store for you in this playlist :) Also if people listen and have song suggestions please feel free to share them in the comments!
> 
> RE: Some of theology getting expressed in this chapter. My experience of Eastern Orthodoxy (aside from reading Tolstoy) is two classes I took in college & all my conversations with my thesis advisor (who is himself Eastern Orthodox) about love and marriage while working on my religion thesis about love & marriage & gay identity in Unitarian Universalism. So, uh, this is kind of a really strange mix of Eastern Orthodox theology as I understand it and my own atheist Unitarian Universalist views. Please don’t take Father Mulcahy in this fanfic as 100% accurately representing Eastern Orthodoxy lol. Anyway...
> 
> Also side note I guess Peggy just… doesn’t exist in this fic? No offense to her but BJ would feel way too guilty to cheat on her & I don’t want to deal with the difficulties of waiting for him to get a letter to her and a reply back etc etc. Maybe she is married to Margret, who is regrettably also not in this fic despite being one of my favorite characters. Maybe if I’m feeling really wild I’ll write a few more chapters after the 4 I planned about the four of them being friends after the war or something… haha jk… unless…
> 
> As always, thank you for reading and kudos and comments especially are appreciated!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's actually going to be one more chapter after this because I decided that, fittingly & in the style of Tolstoy, the doctors needed a long epilogue!
> 
> Also cw: mention of hunting/animal death (not graphic)

And so Pierce, dead set on walking nowhere but away from everyone he knew for a long while, and Hunnicutt, dead set on finding exactly the man who wanted nothing (so he told himself) but to be alone, collided. There was little light to see by – the sun had set, leaving only the fires of the nearby soldiers and the light of the moon to illuminate their steps – and each man was so distracted that when their paths collided it was with real, physical force. Hunnicutt’s skull cracked with a fierce and regretful noise into Pierce’s face, so that Pierce came away clutching his eye.

Irritation at the unexpected pain, as well at the forced encounter with just the man whom he could not now bear to see (overwhelmed as he was with a love that threatened to spill out of the cracks in his ironic monologue), welled up in Pierce. Pierce gripped onto this irritation as though it were a life vest; it was an emotion to moor him amid the sea of others he could not weather, and so he spat out, “Beej, we just finished up with all our patients, what, do you miss pulling sixteen-hour days and want to have to operate on my eye next?”

Hunnicutt, for his part, had no quip to return. If Pierce had looked up at Hunnicutt then, he would have seen in Hunnicutt’s face an expression like that of a man just awoken from a dream. Hunnicutt had left the cottage (where Andrei was) in the full throes of the grand sweep of romantic love and with an intention toward declaring it. But to find Pierce here, now, and clearly in a mood so different from Hunnicutt’s own; it reminded Hunnicutt that nothing of the world had changed but only his own intentions. He was unsure, now, how these intentions might fare against the realities of the world, and he felt his previous dedication to confessing to Pierce waver within him.

Still, he could not allow himself to linger long on this existential question of love, for before him was Pierce, looking as though he might spit venom if only he’d known how. “Jeez, Hawkeye, come on, I’m sorry. Here, come on, let me look at it.”

“Oh, no, I don’t let anyone look in my eyes until at least the third date,” Pierce replied testily. Although he regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth, he found himself returning, in his moment of pain and confusion, to the script he knew best, which was, unfortunately, that of making a joke out of his most raw and tender feelings.

“What about if I buy you a vodka?” Hunnicutt said, pulling gently at Pierce’s arm now so as to guide him closer to the fire (where there was both light with which the injury could be observed, as well as the promise of vodka that might be shared from the soldier’s rations). As always, Pierce found even his most firm resolve toward obstinate misery slipping just slightly beneath the enormous pressure of a single utterance from Hunnicutt. He thus acquiesced, allowing himself to be led toward the fire, though he refused to continue the joke with Hunnicutt any further and deluded himself into believing that, in his silence, he had maintained some semblance of dignity.

As they got closer to the fire, the soldiers glanced over toward them, though were not long distracted by the appearance of the doctors from the telling of their war stories, tales of glory exaggerated even more than usual tonight to cover up the anxiety they felt over the fate of Moscow. O’Reilly and Mulcahy, too, were gathered around one of the fires, but once again, the conflict which was felt so strongly by Pierce and Hunnicutt remained unrecognizable even to those who knew them well, and so the doctor’s colleagues continued to chatter easily with their companions around the fire, paying Hunnicutt and Pierce no real mind.

“Move your hand, Hawk,” Hunnicutt said. “I can’t see anything if you keep holding it like that.”

“And I can’t see anything, period,” Pierce shot back.

“Don’t say that,” Hunnicutt said. Though he was reluctant to admit as much to himself, this small injury and the accompanying dramatics worried him. He could not help but think back to earlier injuries of Pierce’s, each incident etched in his mind like notched measurements of height that linger on doorframes even after the family has left the house. He recalled with particularly vivid force the week his companion had spent with his eyes bandaged, unsure whether or not he would regain his vision, how helpless Pierce had felt and thus Hunnicutt had felt by proxy. It was therefore with particular anxiety that he stepped forward toward Pierce to inspect the injury. He found, to his great relief, that even in the low firelight he could tell the injury was far from grave. Though Pierce glowered up at him, Hunnicutt could not help but smile in return.

“You’ll be fine,” Hunnicutt said. “Let’s get you some vodka and put some snow on it.”

“Ah, but what about my good looks? Will I ever get them back?” Pierce said, all too aware of how close they stood to each other. His initial irritation had passed. Just as the reality of seeing Pierce had reminded Hunnicutt that the external world had not yet shifted to reflect his internal change, Hunnicutt’s presence had done the same for Pierce. While the maintenance of normalcy had distressed Hunnicutt, Pierce could not resist the comfort of it, and that, along with the relief Hunnicutt exuded at finding Pierce’s injury minor, bolstered him into a better mood. It was easier for Pierce to slip into the rhythm of jokes and emotions pushed aside than to maintain his foul mood and thus remind himself that any sort of turbulence might remain somewhere within him.

“Your good looks? That’s what the vodka is for,” Hunnicutt told him, looking suddenly away from Pierce and walking toward one of the fires around which the other men gathered. Pierce followed. The men, as all had been patients of the doctors and many credited them with having saved their lives, were more than happy to produce two metal cups and pour a generous amount of their ration of vodka into each. The doctors soon found themselves persuaded to join in with the men and sit around the fire. Pierce found himself pulled away from Hunnicutt and towards some soldier who wanted to thank him in particular.

If there had existed between Hunnicutt and Pierce only friendship, all the earlier tensions of the night might have melted easily away into the comradery of the group, for though the doctors did not share many of the men’s particular view of war, they were usually happy to share a drink with others and to find some small relief in proof that there were lives they could save. But the disruption to both men’s usual way of thinking had been too great earlier that day, and besides his own confusion, each man was keenly aware, too, that something of this turmoil existed in the other man as well. Each man felt, in equal parts, disquieted by his previous conversations, relieved at some small thing (Hunnicutt at Pierce’s eye being well, Pierce at seeing Hunnicutt’s smile as he looked at him in the firelight), warmed by the fire, and cheered by the vodka.

Still, despite the fact that the company of the other soldiers was easy and pleasant, despite the fact that each man knew he could have slipped into the stupor of light conversation with strangers until he drank himself into exhaustion in the early hours of the morning – despite the ease with which each man could have lost himself to the cohesion of the group, both Hunnicutt and Pierce found himself looking up, across the fire, out toward the one other person who he knew would not let him drink this night down into oblivion like any other. Each man reached out for the image of the other that he perceived more clearly than all else around him, despite the haze of the fire which obscured him in reality.

The pleasure of this connection across the voices and bodies of the other men came from the sharpness of this perception, the fact each man remained, to the other, distinct. The heat of the fire, the sting of the vodka, the feeling of his hair against the nape of his own neck: each of these sensations his body grew accustomed to and eventually discarded, melding all the pleasures and small annoyances of the night into one easy impression. But the awareness of the other man, this neither Hunnicutt nor Pierce could ever discard, nor ever would they ever want to. The other man’s presence was the singular aspect of each man’s life that remained, though familiar, never an accustomed fact of life but always, distinctly, a joy. What a surprise, to look up from the fire, and to see you there. What a surprise to see you looking back at me, still. Choosing to see me, and me to see you, again, in this moment. *

And so a look passed between them, a look which was similar to many they had shared before. But, due the internal circumstances in which each found himself, this was a look which could not be merely savored silently, passed over as a promise to talk at the end of the party, to make their way home together at some later time. Each felt a new urgency accompany this old glance, and, turning to their newly-made acquaintances, excused themselves rather quickly. Both felt that something was coming to a head and each wanted to get whatever confrontation had to be had over with quickly, Pierce so that things could return to normal and Hunnicutt so that he did not lose his wavering courage to confess.

Meeting by the edge of the fire, Pierce turned to Hunnicutt and said, “Walk me home?”

“Be glad to, dear,” Hunnicutt said, linking his arm through Pierce’s. Each grinned at the other as they began to lope the short distance back from the fires to the cabin where they would stay the night. Despite the looming threat of some sort of confrontation, or perhaps because of it, they found themselves wanting to savor these last minutes of easy company. Each had drank just enough vodka to feel giddy; to feel, for a minute, like young people who have just begun courting, when nothing has happened but everything might, where newness equates to infinity and each glance contains the promise of thousand things more to come. Pierce felt, in that moment, the safety of having almost all he wanted without the risk of asking for it all. _This could be enough,_ he told himself. _If I could have just this moment, forever, this would be enough._

Hunnicutt, for his part, tried to tell himself the same but was unable to do so. To disturb this moment seemed impossible – just when Pierce was happy again, to risk upsetting it all seemed absurd. And yet.

And yet. A distinction must be made now between the life each man had been living up to this point. Pierce had, since nearly the moment he had met the man, been aware of his love for Hunnicutt and the fact of his wanting the other man. It was merely that he believed the feelings unreturned that kept him from voicing this out loud. He had thus learned to live with the feeling, to recognize it even as it went unspoken. Hunnicutt, for his part, though he had been drawn just as quickly to Pierce, had not allowed himself, fully, to acknowledge all it was that he felt. Pierce was saved by his belief in the unchanging reality of his feelings going unrequited; he had always had room for all that he felt, and had indeed felt it so much that it had crowded out any other emotion, including that of hope. Hunnicutt, on the other hand, had kept himself from being overwhelmed by hope by excluding from his conscious mind the possibility that there was something he wanted at all.

And so, while Pierce’s conversation with Mulcahy had destabilized him by inducing in him a brief feeling of hope, Hunnicutt’s conversation with Andrei had unearthed not merely hope but had forced an acknowledgment of what it was he might even hope for. Hunnicutt’s world had thus been further destabilized than Pierce’s, and he found it harder to set it back to rights; he found, as the two men walked back toward the room with the separate beds, that he, in fact, might not _want_ to set it back to rights.

Hunnicutt was unsure just how to introduce the matter of the feelings which now newly consumed his consciousness and all of his being, body and soul. Still, he knew he needed to stop Pierce before they reached the room. To reach the room would mean being reminded of the conflict of the one bed the night before, and even a hint of this previous argument would have strained Hunnicutt more than he already was, making it nearly impossible for him to say anything, let alone to make a true confession of his feelings. Searching his mind now for any sort of romantic overture, he settled instead for telling Pierce, “We never put any snow on your eye. It’ll be worse in the morning if we don’t do it now.”

“Always the gentleman,” Pierce replied, almost giggling as he allowed himself to be pulled a few feet off the path back toward the cabins and just into the woods. Pierce stood watching, his hands in his pockets, as Hunnicutt reached down and grabbed a fistful of snow off the ground. Instead of giving it to Pierce so that the man might hold it to his own face, Hunnicutt did the job for him, and the two men stood for a minute in silence.

During this minute, Pierce had the new and peculiar sensation of being entirely unsure of what Hunnicutt was thinking. Further, with the snow on his one eye forcing him to keep it closed, he was unable even to look at the other man and try to ascertain anything from his expression. Pierce found that this quickly became unbearable, and he reached up and swatted the snow away.

Hunnicutt, for his part, had gone from using the snow as an excuse to get off the path to becoming all-consumed in the business of holding the snow to Pierce’s face. _It really will be a bad black eye if he doesn’t ice it,_ he thought. He thus responded quite indignantly to Pierce’s wiping away of the snow from his face; Hunnicutt’s frustration with this small act was compounded by the material fact of the snow falling down the front of Hunnicutt’s jacket as it was dislodged. Wiping it away, Hunnicutt said, “Hawk, come on, you’ve gotten snow all over me.”

“My eye was on the verge of getting frostbite,” Pierce replied. “What’s up with you, anyway, leading me into the dark woods after a night of drinking? Vodka making you a bit fresh?”

Instead of joining in on the joke as he normally would have, Hunnicutt told Pierce, “I’m not getting a bit fresh.”

This threw Pierce a bit, but in an attempt to maintain his usual attitude, he barreled on. “I didn’t say I minded,” he said.

“Stop,” Hunnicutt said.

“What?”

“I said stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop saying things like that. That, that… that you don’t mind it. That I’m getting fresh. Asking me to walk you home.”

At this, Pierce balked. There was no longer denying the serious tone that Hunnicutt had taken, and all it took was an instant of disapproval for Pierce to worry, suddenly, despite years of having known the man, that Pierce had finally taken it too far this time, that Hunnicutt not only did not return his affections but was disgusted by even this joking expression of them. It was all Pierce could do not to crumble right there into the snow, but, maintaining his composure, he asked instead, “Are you saying you don’t like me?” He meant it as a joke, and indeed, in tone it was, but his eyes revealed him; the moonlight was enough for Hunnicutt to catch in them everything Pierce wanted not to reveal: his anxiety at rejection, of having taken things to far, his question if this was the sudden end.

“Of course I like you, Hawk,” Hunnicutt said, almost angry. It wasn’t how he meant to sound, but the depth of his emotion overwhelmed him. “Of course I like you. That’s just the problem. I like it when you take my arm, and ask me to walk you home, and when you talk about what soup you’ll make us when the war is done. That’s just the problem. I like it all too much. It all means to much to me. I can’t take it anymore, unless you tell me it means the same to you as well.”

For any other man, this would have been enough: the intensity in Hunnicutt’s eyes, the sincerity with which he spoke, the very content of his words – all this would have assured almost any other person in Pierce’s place that this was a confession of love. But for Pierce, who had lived so long without hope, even this outpouring left him uncertain. Each man stood facing the other, mere feet apart, merely looking at one another. “What do you mean, does it mean the same?” Pierce said finally, slowly.

“Damn it, Hawk. You know what I mean. Don’t play like this.”

“I don’t know what you mean, BJ. All we do is play. All we do is joke. It’s all just a joke, isn’t it?”

“What if wasn’t?” Hunnicutt said. “What if it wasn’t, not to me?”

“What do you want me to say?” Pierce replied. He then continued, with the overblown affectation of a lover on the stage, “Do you want me to tell you that I want you, I want you, I want you? A thousand times I want you?”

“Well, don’t you?” Hunnicutt said. Having considered himself to have already laid his own feelings bare, he was unwilling to say any more until Pierce had declared himself as well. But Pierce, having not perceived Hunnicutt’s declaration of feelings as such, was unwilling to fully let down his defenses until the other man had done so. And so each man waiting, not speaking, for the other to give in first.

“Damn it, Hawk,” Hunnicutt said finally. “Is that really all this is? Some big joke to you? Years of playing house, keeping yourself entertained while you wait for the war to end?”

“What do you want from me?” Pierce repeated.

“I want you to say that you want me, clear and simple. I want you to mean it. I want you to say one thing you mean, Hawkeye,” Hunnicutt said.

“I can’t say it,” Pierce said, feeling himself backed into a corner, knowing full well know that he could no longer avoid the question Hunnicutt was putting forward but knowing, too, that he couldn’t make himself say the words. He looked at Hunnicutt full in the face then, trying to convey in the intensity of his gaze how sincerely he meant what he said next, “I can’t say it, okay? Because… because as crazy as everything in this damned war is, it’s survivable. The kids who are out there fighting each other, the ones who die for no reason, the ones I can’t save – I don’t understand it, and it’s changed me, probably irrevocably and for the worse, but it’s survivable. But if I told you how I really felt about you, if I said it really and truly out loud, I know you couldn’t say it back, not the way I need you to, and that wouldn’t be survivable. Everything else here, it’s survivable only because of you. And I know I don’t get to have you, not all of you, not like I want you. I get to have you in pieces or not at all, so I settle for the pieces. And I can’t give them up. Please don’t ask me to give them up.” At this, Pierce tore his gaze away, looking down at the earth as though a prisoner looking away from his executioner, hoping to put off his inevitable end just a moment longer.

To his surprise, he felt Hunnicutt’s hand on his face then, this time no cold of snow between them but merely the heat of flesh. Pierce had laid himself as bare as he was able, and Hunnicutt had come to meet him, removing his glove and stepping the few feet forward in the snow to take his face like a lover. He looked at Pierce as though to kiss him, but seemed to stop himself, and said instead, “Hawk. I’m not asking you to give anything up. You’re crazy if you think I feel any other way about you, if you think I—I’ve saved you, or something, when you’re the one who keeps me sane. I want it all – the cottage and the rose garden and me holding your yarn for you while you knit, vegetables from our garden and, and – and kids, a family –“

It was this vision of domesticity that finally ignited a passion in Pierce so strong that he could no longer contain himself. His mouth found Hunnicutt’s and he kissed the man as though it were the first thing he had ever done in his life that meant anything. Hunnicutt, for his part, was surprised only for a second before he returned the full force of the kiss with equal passion, hands tangling in Pierce’s hair.

Elsewhere, Moscow had started to burn. All the soldiers around their own fires saw it first, a small flicker in the distance, barely perceptible. Natasha, at the window of a cabin, saw it too, calling Sonya and the rest of her family to her side, and each felt in themselves more awe or bewilderment than righteous fury or sadness. Though the force of the fire, for those in Moscow, blazed hotter than a kiln and grew with every moment that passed, for the Rostovs and the soldiers it was a long ways off, and each could not help that the full force and consequence of the moment had not yet revealed itself to them, but only flickered in the distance. The flames which would soon consume Moscow seemed to them as far as the comet which had heralded the end of times almost a year earlier, the comet which many of them had seen from that very city which now burned.

But still they gathered to watch, to try to make sense of that fire off in the distance. Only Pierce and Hunnicutt remained unaware. What did they care if the capitol city, the heart of Russia, burned? What did they care if, in fact, the whole world lit up in flames around them? If indeed God were to light afire the very trees beside them now, so that the whole of the woods burned brightly in the snow like the trails of so many comets brought down to earth, each man would have found in this strange event not disaster but affirmation. Neither would have found it odd that the passion of their love, for so long unexpressed, now lit the whole world up, awakening the trees to burn.

As it was, the fires in Moscow burned a long way off, and the woods around the lovers remained dark and quiet, their love known only to them.

Still, as unaware as they felt of the world around them, the bitter cold of the September air could not be long withstood even by two so oblivious to anything but each other. Without speaking, but through some unspoken agreement, the two men began to pull each other, laughing, toward the cottage where they were to stay. Each knew they had left O’Reilly and Mulcahy safely around the fire, and that despite all that had transpired that night, it was not yet late enough to draw the other men to bed. Each man wanted, more than anything, to reach the sanctuary of the empty room but found himself unable to tear himself away from the other man for more than a moment, and so it took quite a minute for them to travel the short distance, stopping as they did to kiss once again every few feet.

Upon reaching the door, Pierce turned to Hunnicutt and said, “Well, are you going to carry me across the threshold?” Each man found that to joke, now that they had expressed the full depth of their feeling, was pleasurable once again. Now, to joke about their love felt not like a dismissal. Instead, it was merely that the depth of their emotion was too much to be contained or expressed with sincere utterances. To joke about it now allowed them to dwell not just on the sincerity of all they felt but also on the joy of it, the absurd pleasure that came in having been given at once everything they assumed they would forever be denied. Hunnicutt, for his part, was glad to take the joke further, and did indeed attempt to sweep Pierce off his feet, barely managing to carry the other men to bed before the both of them fell into it, limbs tangled together, laughing.

Hunnicutt’s passion did not burn; instead, he felt it as clear and cool within him as the moonlight or the snow, and as expansive and everlasting as either. This realization of wanting something awakened all his senses and ran with cold, tingling clarity to the tips of his fingers, tangled as they were in Pierce’s hair. He felt as though he were seeing everything in the world for the first time as pleasure previously unknown to him was at last his.

But in Pierce, the passion burned like fire, finally unable to be contained. While Hunnicutt felt his passion an awakening, Pierce felt his a surrender. After so long of knowing what he wanted without hope of ever having it, all it took was a spark to totally consume him. Here was something he could not control, and just as he had struggled for so long to keep his passion contained, he now found it hard to let himself feel it in its totality. And yet, fighting one last battle within himself, he found he was able to give himself over fully not just to his own emotion but the hope and recognition of finding it reciprocated in full force by another.

Each man’s passion was differently felt but equally strong, and it was no sign from God that affirmed the goodness of what they had finally found together, only the sighs of pleasure that they heard from one another, and the affirmations whispered in the dark. _This is good. I want you. I want you. I want you._ And so Moscow burned, and soldiers and priests and the noble people with their great wealth left behind them turned their eyes toward the far horizon to watch the grand scale of history change. And Pierce and Hunnicutt, for their part, remained unaware of anything except the other, and everything new that had been awakened in them.

***

Pierce and Hunnicutt were not the only lovers to come together that night. After the two men had fallen to quiet sleep, the others in the camp stayed looking at the fires in Moscow. It was only with great reluctance and in the early hours of the morning that most of them found their way to bed. Finally, the only two that remained awake within the camp were Natasha and Andrei. Natasha, having alerted her family to the fires, had then quickly moved away from the window, finding herself unable to look upon some distant disaster when within her heart there remained a much more private, yet no less urgent, pain. She sat, waiting out the long hours of her family’s waking, thinking only of Andrei and experiencing at once longing, then righteous fury, then sadness, and so forth.

Natasha had always been given to heightened emotions, perhaps all the more so because she was told they were not good for her. The periods of illness that she experienced, when she would withdraw into herself, speaking little and rarely leaving the house, were not brought on, as her family seemed to assume, _by_ the strength of emotion she felt but due to her inability to express them within the confines of what was expected from her. Natasha thought often of that day of hunting with her brother, Nikolai. How he had told her not to follow and yet she had anyway, taking her horse out in quick pursuit, how, once she was out in the field, he had recognized in her steel nerves equal to his own and allowed her to ride with him.

That day out in the forest, Natasha had felt something cold within her, had wanted to take the gun from her brother’s hand and shoot the cornered fox herself. It was not an instinct she liked in herself, but it was one not borne out of merely wanting to prove to the men that she was as good at the sport as they were. There was something in her, separate from any need to prove herself, that wanted to be the one to push the fox into the corner just to see what it did, to see how long it would fight even when surrounded, before she finally snapped it out of its misery in one harsh, quick moment. Still, she resisted the urge within her, not because she knew the men would find such a breach of propriety unforgiveable and would force her at once back home, but because she knew, on some deeper level that that which wanted to kill the fox, that to escape one’s cage could not be done by the taking of the keys for your own use.

And so she had melted that feeling of steel within her heart, that razor’s edge on which rested her hurt and her want to cause pain. She had not tampered herself down but merely found a way toward some wild joy outside of pain and death and away from the hunting grounds all together. Nikolai and her, the day of hunting done, had not returned home but had instead ridden, quite spontaneously, to the home of their uncle. There, he had allowed Natasha to drink as though she were a man, until that drinking had given in to dancing. Her uncle had not told her, then, that she danced like a man. He had said merely that she danced like a Russian, and it was this that had awaken in Natasha such fierce joy that when she and her brother finally made their way home long past the hour reason would have told them to depart – it was this fierce joy that drove her not towards killing but towards life, to push the horses faster than was safe, to take the furs from her face and breathe in winter, to laugh and yell not like a woman and not like a man but, instead, finally, like herself.

It was this day that she thought of most of all as she waited to go to Andrei. Her brother was perhaps the person that knew her best, besides her cousin Sonya, and yet even he had first tried to stop her from following him onto the hunting field, to keep her fit into the small space society allowed her. She worried that the same might hold true for Andrei, that any man in her life would always have his mind clouded at least a bit by the fact of his manliness as others presented it to him. Still, she did not want to stay away from Andrei, for to do so felt, to Natasha, like closing herself off from life as much as staying home that day Nikolai went out would have. Despite the dangers to her, she did want to love, and she told herself she would do so as long as she could do it in defiance.

This burning resolve not to compromise her own person, mingled with her anxiety of the state of Andrei’s body and soul (for she, having ridden in another carriage and not the cart with Andrei, knew nothing of his conversations that day or what he felt when he considered their future) – these thoughts kept her mind sharp even as the late hours dragged on. Finally, when all others around her were clearly asleep, she went to him.

She found him the only man in his room awake, and he looked at her silently but with clearer eyes than she felt she had ever seen before in his face, even in their past life together, during the engagement. Only once she had crept closer and seated herself beside him on his bed did either of them speak. They did not take hands this time as they had that morning, feeling that this conversation now was not a sweet reunion but a hard and necessary negotiation of what their future life might hold.

“Moscow has burned, then,” Andrei said.

“Yes,” Natasha replied. “How are you? Are you well?”

“I think I will live.”

Each had so much to say to the other that they found themselves speaking almost as strangers, both unwilling to be the first to express that which was less than easy and beautiful within them. Each stared at the other, relishing the pleasure of being able to look upon the face of someone that had for long been turned away but fearing, also, that this might be their final chance to do so. Finally, Natasha burst out, “I cannot be your wife!”

“So you knew I intended to ask again,” Andrei said resignedly. “You know me so well even as you refuse me.”

Tears shone in Natasha’s face, but they were not borne out of sadness, only out of so much fierce emotion as could not be contained within her. “I cannot be your wife,” she said, “but I could marry you, if you were to ask again. Only I would need to be sure that you knew, truly, who it was you were marrying.”

Andrei laughed softly then. “And why did you not put it to me this way from the start,” he said, “but first let me suffer the small death of thinking you loved me no longer? I want you, Natasha, all of you.”

“Are you sure?” she said, in a tone akin to anger. “I must tell you, before you say anything more, why I turned to Kurigan as I did, though I know it will pain us both to speak of it.” She continued without even pausing for breath, sure that the slightest hesitation would find Andrei telling her he forgave her, or that it was of the past, or even that she herself would waver in her resolve without needing a word from him. So she pushed on. “I do regret that I was untrue to you because I hate to have caused you pain. And I regret, even more, having let Kuragin think, even for a moment, that he was my equal. But still, I cannot say that, looking back, I see how anything else could have happened. Our engagement, though there was real passion there from me and, I believe, from you also, was so quick. You had hardly time to know me. And I know you said, as you were still young, and I had refused so many suitors before, that you wanted to be sure, on each of our parts, that this was what we wanted most truly.”

She continued, “I cannot fault you for your reasons for going away, but what you created, however unintentionally, was a feeling within me of that of a young maiden awaiting her heroic husband’s return. You see, Andrei, an engaged woman is not afforded the freedoms that an engaged man is. I do not mean to suggest—“ she added quickly, seeing that Andrei sought to interject and anticipating what it was he would say, “I do not mean to suggest that you abused those freedoms, or used your time abroad to seek immoral companionship. I only mean to say that a woman engaged anticipates a loss of certain freedoms as a wife that a man does not. I turned to Kuragin not because I loved him truly and loved you not, but only to prove to myself that I could still move about the world as my own person, and not just as someone who would soon belong to you, that I could make my own decisions, however brash they might have been.”

She did pause, now, hesitating to see if Andrei would call her ungrateful, then, or malicious, or something worse, but he said nothing, eyes dark, listening. “If we are to marry,” she said finally, “you must love me not as a woman but as Natasha. If you promise me that this is what you intend, and if you keep your word truly, then nothing would make me happier than to accept your twice-given proposal.”

For a moment, Andrei said nothing, and Natasha feared she had driven him away even as she refused to compromise anything within herself to win him back. But such was not the case. He only sought to take what she had said fully into his heart before offering any words of his own. Finally, he replied, “That is all I would hope for in our marriage and more. I have told you already of my regrets when it came to Lise. But though I knew, when we first met, that I had made the mistake of seeing in her merely a woman and not a full person, I had not realized before now that this is not where my mistake ended. What I see now is that I sought not just the ‘perfect woman’ but also sought to make myself the ‘perfect man.’ I know now that that cannot be done. Further, I know it is not something which I want to seek any longer. I followed my heroes into battle and found them all lacking and the promise of manhood an empty shell. I want to live now as my own person upon God’s earth and nothing more. I no longer seek to be remembered by history, for everything that one might do and be remembered for is vile, and everything we do that will be forgotten is that which is most precious to me. My injuries are such that, though I will live, they will relieve me from this horrid duty of war, and, if you were to consent to it, I would, in an instant, follow you back to your family’s home in the country and, in renewing our engagement, seek with you new ways of living outside of all that which our parents have given us.”

The tears which had, for so long, hovered in Natasha’s eyes now spilled over, an outpouring not of anger but of gladness. She did, finally, take Andrei’s hand in her own, kissing it as gentlemen often kiss ladies’ hands, and each felt in this one small and tender gesture the promise of all that lay ahead for them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * “isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of / strangers my most tender feelings / writhe and / bear the fruit of screaming” – “For Grace, After A Party” by Frank O’Hara, aka the best poem ever written. It's [here](https://allpoetry.com/For-Grace,-After-A-Party) if you are interested in reading my fav poem of all time. He has so many good ones, including this one [this one](https://poets.org/poem/having-coke-you) as well. We love a gay poet! Anyway, after this brief Frank O'Hara detour, back to the story.
> 
> If anyone is interested, I wrote another M*A*S*H fanfic. This one is much shorter & in a very different style so they get to do things like make dick jokes. It's [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25409377) if anyone is interested.
> 
> Thanks as always for reading!! This fic, as I said above, will be finishing up with a long epilogue that should be up sometime this week!


	5. Epilogue: The Folks Who Live on the Hill

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because I am an unhinged person, I made myself a playlist of songs with specific good vibes that fit this chapter (because this chapter is good vibes only!! excluding one tiny moment of angst earlier on) & I listened to it while writing, so it is [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/36A4pXItB2oI1i4STEh9vr?si=YcZ_-lp4R_-5zx7gaAC-Dw) if anyone is interested in listening to it while they read. Either way, enjoy the chapter!

Though Moscow had burned and four lover’s worlds had been overturned, everyone still awoke the next morning to find the same banal concerns to greet them. There was breakfast to be cooked, carts to be packed, and road to be traveled. Natasha and Andrei had gone to the Count and Countess at first light and delivered to them the news of their engagement. Though the Count and Countess had at first received this news warily, Sonya had begun to cry out of gladness, and her pure state of selfless joy had so moved the Countess that she, too, had begun to cry, however involuntarily. Seeing all this, the Count had found himself unable to refuse to give his blessing. Natasha and Andrei sat, then, side by side at breakfast, talking gladly and oblivious to all others around them.

Pierce and Hunnicutt were even more of a sight to behold than the two young lovers. While there was obviously a glad change between the relation of Andrei and Natasha, as evidenced in their pink cheeks and shy smiles as they whispered to each other, their love was a quiet one, the new character of which they sought to preserve by shielding it, at least in part, from the world. Hunnicutt and Pierce, on the other hand, having lived for so many years with such repressed feeling, became at once the most obnoxious people in all of the camp, more boastful in the way they behaved around each other than the loudest and drunkest soldier set on regaling others with his war exploits.

Pierce sat practically in Hunnicutt’s lap, and the two of them did not whispered but joked with one another about all the same trivialities that they had before, only more loudly. Most everyone in the camp found themselves confused by this change in behavior, as they had almost all believed the doctors to have already declared themselves to each other long ago. O’Reilly and Mulcahy, who were eating near the two doctors, looked at them in bemusement.

“You know,” Pierce was telling Hunnicutt, “when I said I wanted to honeymoon in the countryside this isn’t quite what I had in mind.”

“Yeah, where are those mimosas we ordered? The service here is terrible,” Hunnicutt replied and then actually began to look around, as if for a waiter, though he was met only with other soldiers rolling their eyes at him.

“Excuse me, sirs,” O’Reilly finally interjected, “but did you actually get married last night?” He was distressed at the thought of having missed the ceremony.

At this, Pierce smacked his forehead, turning to Hunnicutt and saying, “I knew we were forgetting something! The army did us the favor of planning out this lovely little tour of Russia for us and we go and forget to actually exchange the vows before setting out on it.”

“Yes, we ought to rectify this immediately. Is there some sort of ship’s captain around here that can marry us?” Hunnicutt said, looking around again.

At this, Father Mulcahy spoke up tersely and said, “Well, I don’t really know what’s going on with you two boys, but if you really want to get married, I’m perfectly capable of officiating.” He was annoyed not at any of their shows of affection but merely that they were making a joke about looking for an officiant instead of immediately asking him to do the honors of conducting the ceremony.

Hunnicutt turned to Pierce, a crooked smile on his face and said, “You know, we really could, couldn’t we? We could get married right here.”

Pierce grinned back at him, and looked about to agree, but unfortunately for them, they had picked a poor time to fall in love, for right then a cavalry member rode up to the camp and, dismounting his horse, began asking around for Hunnicutt, Pierce, Mulcahy, and O’Reilly. The soldiers quickly pointed them out, and the man made his way over. “Ah, good! The rest of your unit has been looking for you! I’ve got orders here for you four to rejoin them and information on where they can be found.”

The four companions quickly took the written directions from the officer; they had been worried about the rest of their unit, though they had not allowed themselves to dwell on this worry much, as common as it was in war. As the officer returned to his horse and made his way out of camp, the four of them finished their coffee in quick gulps and began to make their way back to the cottage where they had stayed to gather their things.

Andrei and Natasha were not so caught up in each other as to not notice the imminent departure of the two doctors who had helped bring them together. Quickly, they got up from their seats and made their way over to the small group, Sonya following behind them. Natasha surprised Pierce and Hunnicutt by throwing her arms in effusive joy around the two men she knew even less well than Andrei did. As she pulled back, giving them a grateful look, she said, “Please do be safe. I can’t thank you enough for how you saved Andrei.”

“Well, it’s what we’re paid pennies to do,” Pierce said.

Andrei, for his part, clasped first Pierce’s hands, then Hunnicutt’s, then Mulcahy’s, in his own, telling them affectionately, “Truly, though our time together has been brief, it has meant the world to me. If you ever pass by my estate at Bald Hills, please know that there is a place there for you.” He said this with all the enthusiasm of someone young and in love. He felt at once that Natasha was the only thing in the world which mattered, and so what he did with his material possessions was no longer of any concern to him; and also he wished to share his happiness with all around him in the hopes of opening up even greater pleasure for himself and others. Though Andrei extended this offer in all sincerity, he did so without a care for the details, and Hunnicutt and Pierce at the time dismissed the invitation as inconsequential to them.

Still, they couldn’t help smiling as Hunnicutt told Andrei, “Yes, well, the region may become famous for its croissants by the time we get the chance to pass through it, but you two kids are always welcome to come stay in our lovely little hovel of a military tent next time you want to see the warfront.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t say such things,” Mulcahy said, but even he was too consumed by the contagious happiness in the air to really scold the doctor.

As Andrei and Natasha began to walk back to their breakfast, though, Pierce noticed Sonya lingering behind, not quite following them yet. Pierce, remembering Sonya's shy manner the day before and alert to her hesitation now, sought to drawn her in to their small group in the only way he knew how, reaching out an arm to beckon her over and joking with her. "Sonya, next time you have to make your way back to the front just ask for the doctors with the worst attitudes in the army and they'll send you straight to us. That is, if we haven't eloped by then."

Sonya, glad to be noticed, let herself be drawn into their small circle, but, once there, she found herself unsure of what to say. Still, the doctors were glad to stand just a minute in companionable silence with her. Just as Natasha and Andrei felt sad to see the doctors depart even after so short a time of knowing them, so too did Hunnicutt and especially Pierce find themselves regretful to leave Sonya. This was due in part to the fact that she had an air to her of someone who had never been properly cared for, and Hunnicutt and Pierce found themselves longing to care for people other than those scarred needlessly by battle. It was partly, too, that they saw in her some peculiar feeling which mirrored their own, a hint of that she might one day come to love a woman in much the same way that the doctors loved one another.

Still, there was military business to be attended to, however regretfully so, and O'Reilly gave the doctors a look of urgency that they recognized. "Well—" Hunnicutt began.

At this, Sonya, unable to contain her sadness at their leaving but still too shy to express herself well, also flung herself briefly into the doctors' arms. Hunnicutt smiled down sadly and kindly at her; Pierce actually patted her head in a manner equally awkward and affectionate. "I do hope you'll be well," she said after she had pulled away again.

"Yeah, take care, kid," Pierce replied. With this, the small party finally made its way out onto the road and back toward their unit.

For a while longer, the military had their way with the doctors. Upon reuniting with their unit, they found that there were no more clear orders beyond the reunion. They followed the army as it made a further retreat from Moscow, then found themselves waiting uncertainly with the army during those months in which the French refused to either attack or retreat. When France finally made the decision to retreat, they again followed the army in its seemingly unplanned and uncoordinated attacks against an army already fleeing, and Pierce and Hunnicutt found themselves even more bitter over the senselessness of the deaths they witnessed than they had previously thought possible.

In those last months of the war, the life to which they had grown accustomed in some ways did not change. There was still the same bad food, the periods of intense physical and emotional stress broken up by monotonous boredom. The horrors of war did not cease. They joked much as before and, as they had previously spent all their waking moments together even before confessing their feelings, that did not change. And still, in these last few months of the war, everything was different. Each moment between them now possessed an ease which had not previously been there. To the outside observer, it seemed not much had changed, but Pierce and Hunnicutt both felt a deeper peace within their souls than they had experienced previously.

However, there was still the bloody and awful business of war to be attended to. Each man took refugee in their now openly shared loved, but neither could shelter the other fully from where it was they were; that is, on the battlefield where men died and kept on dying. It was under the conditions of war in which they had met, and so it seemed to both of them, even once the intention of the French to retreat fully out of Russia became clear, that it was always under these same conditions that they would live, never quite free, always on call to try to save lives that should not have been jeopardized in the first place.

And so the end of the war came as an astonishment to them. Pierce in particular, on hearing the news, felt some of that old anxiety of abandonment returning to him and made his way up the hill above where they were stationed, away from the celebrations of the others. Hunnicutt, ever attuned to Pierce as he was, followed, a bottle of half-drunk champagne which he had obtained from sources unknown still in his hand. He found Pierce sitting on a fallen log in the snow, looking out over the vast expanse of white.

“Watcha thinking, doctor?” Hunnicutt said affectionately, settling himself down on the log beside Pierce and running his hands over his own arms in an attempt to warm himself.

“I just don’t think I can believe it’s really over, Beej,” Pierce said.

“I know,” Hunnicutt said, and waited for the other doctor to say more, but Pierce remained, rather uncharacteristically for him, quiet.

“I don’t know how we’re supposed to live, Beej. Out there. Out in a world full of people who haven’t seen… haven’t _done_ the things we’ve done. How are we supposed to carry that weight around with us?”

“I don’t know,” Hunnicutt said. “But we’ll find a way. Because we have to.”

Pierce turned to look at Hunnicutt then. “Will _we_?”

“What do you mean, Hawk?” Hunnicutt asked.

“I mean… I don’t know. You asked me, that first night in the forest, if this was just some lark, playing house till the war was over. And it’s not, for me. But I worry that it might be, for you. That you might not like me, out there in the real world where you can go anywhere, be with anyone…” He trailed off and tore his gaze away from Hunnicutt then, turning to look instead back out at the open forest below them.

“Hawk,” Hunnicutt said, putting a hand on Pierce’s shoulder, feeling Pierce lean gladly into him, though the other man said nothing. “I could say a million times over that I love you, and I know something in you still wouldn’t sit right with it. I wish I could cut out that part of you that doubts that, but I know I can’t, so I’ll just say it again, as much as I can. I love you, and I’m staying. And if you can’t make yourself believe that now, if you can’t trust that I’ll want you till I’m dead and after that too, then just trust the next few years, or the next few months, or hours, or minutes. I’ll keep proving it to you, over and over, that I’m staying. All I need is for you to trust me, right now. We’re free. We could go anywhere. And I mean _we_.” He paused, waiting to see if Pierce would speak. When he didn’t, Hunnicutt added, “And the place we should go right now is back to the bonfires everyone built because it’s damn cold up on this hill.”

“All right,” Pierce said, turning and smiling genuinely if hesitantly at Hunnicutt. “But you have to promise me you’ll take me somewhere better for our next date.”

“I promise,” Hunnicutt said, and together they made their way, hand in hand, back down toward all the other people they loved.

***

It was then that they got married, after the war was done but before the people they loved so much had scattered to all corners of Russia. Each man might have gone through with holding the ceremony that very first day, had they not received orders to meet back up with their unit, but upon this reunion they had each found various reasons to wait. Mostly, it was due to that anxiety Pierce had expressed up on the hill; even Hunnicutt felt it sometimes, although less strongly. Each man had wanted to wait until the war had ended to prove to himself that theirs might be a union formed _in_ the war, but that it was not _of_ the war. This was not something they discussed, but each seemed to know what it was the other thought about the matter anyway. And so, too, after they made their way back down from the hill, did it require minimal conversation to agree that now truly was the time to get married.

So Father Mulcahy got his wish and officiated. Houlihan walked Pierce down the aisle. Klinger revealed that he had been tailoring, in secret, a most gorgeous outfit for each of the two grooms. “I just knew, as soon as you came back from Borodino so in love, that you were gonna need them sooner rather than later,” he told them.* Everyone cried during the ceremony, and during the reception, and then still more when they finally said their goodbyes. But each of them carried out into the world that final moment of joy, so that when they missed one another greatly they could remind themselves that war had ended not just with too many funerals but also, at least, with one wedding.

***

And so Hunnicutt and Pierce made their way out into the world. At first they found a place in Moscow, working to care for the people who slowly but surely returned to rebuild the city. But though they had both lived in cities before the war, they both found it no longer fit with their disposition. They had been younger, when they lived in the city, and they had both felt something lacking in their life, something which they had tried to fill with the crowds and distractions city life offered. But now there was no lack; on the contrary, having found each other, all they wanted was no noise to remind them of the war, no endless list of a million little things that needed doing, but just time to sit peacefully in one another’s company.

It so happened that Andrei, having come into Moscow for business (as he had to more often than he would have liked) heard from some acquaintances of the doctors’ presence in the city. Though they were by no means from the high society in which Andrei moved so reluctantly, the doctors had just so happened to have treated some petitioner who made his way to Andrei’s residence in Moscow. The man remembered them because they had used a “quite remarkable method of medicine,” as he told Andrei. “It involved absolutely no leeches at all, and more hand washing than I find strictly necessary. Still, one can’t deny the results of what they call the ‘Pierce-Hunnicutt treatment method.’”

Though the doctors had, since the war, only given Andrei and Natasha passing thoughts, Andrei still held the doctors in high regard, considering them to have saved his life twice-over. He thus sent a messenger requesting that they do him the pleasure of calling on him. The two doctors did so. Both seemed at first quite ill at ease, refusing to touch most things in the house as if out of fear of breaking something (although they each partook heartily in the spirits offered to them). However, as time went by and Andrei demonstrated a real interest in talking with them about their pacifist ideals and the like, they warmed up to the man and began to tell him in earnest all that they felt of their new life, the joys of living together as well as the strains the city put on them.

Andrei made, then, what was perhaps an impulsive offer, but one which he never later had cause to regret. “Come stay at my estate,” he told them.

“What?” they both asked in almost perfect unison.

“The country has more need for doctors than the city. Moscow is full of men trying to make their way. How many others do you compete with here to make your livelihood? Whereas there are quite a number of farmers in Bald Hills and not a doctor near enough. It is not an uncommon occurrence that a baby is born before a doctor can be fetched or that injuries as a result of farm work find a man having bled to death before help can make its way out to us. There is a cottage on my land a few miles from the house where Natasha and myself reside, so you would have your privacy. Truly, it would be a great service to all of us if you were to come reside there. I will not ask you to make up your mind now. Only consider it, and I will leave with you the address of my residence at Bald Hills, so that you might send me a reply or even make your way to us soon.”

Hunnicutt turned to Pierce with raised eyebrows then, but nothing more was said of it at the time. It was only after they made their way from Andrei’s house at a late hour and began to wind their way through the Moscow streets that they began to talk it over. “It’s crazy,” Hunnicutt said, “but is it any crazier than anything else we’ve been through? Anything else we’ve done?”

And so the doctors went to live in the country in a house all their own. It was not that to move out of the city cured them of all their nightmares, but it gave each man the to space to wake up to a silent world with only the sound of his husband’s breath beside him. When they attended a beside in their medical capacity, it was as often a birth or a broken arm on a child who had ridden a horse joyfully and too fast through the country, a child who would heal quickly, as it was anything more serious. They helped the elders of the village live longer and made easier their passing from this life to what lay beyond.

Hunnicutt in particular was fond of the children, and would bring with him to such house calls sticks of honey from the small hive they kept in their backyard or fresh berries for them. He was easily convinced to stay and play all sorts of games with their siblings, or even with his young patients themselves if he had returned for a follow-up visit and found them well again. Pierce loved and was loved most dearly by the elderly; he would often sit with them for hours after he was supposed to. He would come and bring his lavender oil which so helped their arthritis**, and then he would sit and knit with the old ladies, exchanging patterns and techniques, helping them (both literally and figuratively) spin their yarn. Both Pierce and the old women of the village would share and take quite seriously the most minute details of their day to day lives. The old women would tell him about the fish their husbands had caught in the nearby streams (offering him lox to take home with him) and Pierce would describe the roses his husband was growing in their garden.

For as much as their work had begun again to sustain and not deplete their souls, they had time, too, for much outside of work. Hunnicutt indeed got the rose garden he had joked about that night in Moscow, as well as the vegetable garden. He kept, for many long years, the same ragged, floppy hat he had worn when off duty during the war. He wore it now in the garden, spending hours on his knees, barefoot in the dirt and under the sun before coming inside with a wicker basket full of fresh food that Pierce would then spend hours turning into something good for them to eat together. Pierce took particular delight in wearing a frilly apron around the house that had been among the gifts Klinger had given him on his wedding day. He baked bread and knit while Hunnicutt gardened; and thus their life became one where that had as much time to help things grow, to indulge in the pleasures of creating, as they did to help mend broken bodies.

***

Months in to their second year at the cottage, their second summer, Hunnicutt came in from the garden with a basket full of raspberries and roses. He found Pierce standing at the high table in the kitchen, kneading dough while warm light spilled in through the little kitchen window that was framed with dried herbs and small paintings of vegetables that Natasha had made and gifted to them. Seeing Pierce, Hunnicutt paused in the doorway just to take him in, overwhelmed, still, that he was allowed to look at Pierce now as long as he wanted. For a second, Pierce seemed not to notice he was being observed, but then he looked up and made a face. “What?” he said. “Do I have flour on my face?”

“I was just regarding you,” Hunnicutt said, smiling.***

“Send my regards to me,” Pierce replied.

“That doesn’t even make any sense, Hawk,” Hunnicutt said, coming fully into the kitchen now to set his basket on the table near where Pierce was baking.

“I know, it was a reach. Here, try this dough. I added lavender this time, I don’t know if it’s good.” Pierce paused his kneading briefly to hold out a piece of dough toward Hunnicutt.

Hunnicutt, for his part, made a face and tried to push the piece of dough away even as Pierce tried even more persistently to get him to eat it. Hunnicutt told Pierce, “That’s just a piece of uncooked bread! I won’t be able to tell anything from eating it!”

“Just try it!” Pierce said. “It won’t kill you!”

Hunnicutt sighed and took the dough. “That’s true, if I can survive years of that mess tent, I can survive your uncooked bread.”

“Do _not_ insult my bread by comparing it to the mess tent.”

“I’m comparing your _uncooked, raw_ dough to the mess tent.”

“Still,” Pierce said, jokingly brandishing a rolling pin that was lying near by before setting it down and returning to the task of kneading. “Anyway, how is it?”

“I’m sure it’ll be good once it’s cooked,” Hunnicutt said. “I can taste… lavender.”

“Oh, you and your uncultured palate. Can I have a raspberry?”

“Sure,” Hunnicutt said. Knowing Pierce wanted to continue his work with the bread, Hunnicutt fetched a raspberry from his basket and fed it to Pierce as he worked. He then took the basket and began to do many small tasks around the kitchen, finding a vase for the roses, filling it with water from the bucket, finding a place for the raspberries, setting cooking implements left lying out from last night’s dinner back to rights. As he did so, he told Pierce, “I’m worried about my tomato plants. They’ve got aphids all over them.”

“Tell them you’re a military man. That’ll scare them off,” Pierce said.

“Somehow, I don’t think that’ll work.”

“Are we going to have to perform a tomato-ectemy?”

“Oh, yes. I’m going to publish a paper on it and get quite famous.”

Pierce snickered at this, and then the two men lapsed into happy silence. After a minute, though, Hunnicutt added, “Don’t forget that we have Natasha, Andrei, Sonya, and Marya coming over for dinner tonight.”

“Oh, yes, I was going to make them some of my bruschetta. Will you start chopping olives for me?”

“Of course, dear,” Hunnicutt said. In that “dear” there lingered some of the joking tone he had so often affected in their war years, before they had made their mutual affections known, but again this was only to cover the great sincerity with which he meant it. He loved Pierce so much it almost pained him to say so aloud, and Pierce knew it, and was glad to hear the layers of affectionate humor and love in that one word.

It was now quite a common occurrence for them to have the two younger couples over for dinner – for Sonya and Marya (Andrei’s sister) were indeed now, three years after the war, married. Sonya had moved to Bald Hills when Natasha had gone to live there with Andrei. She had gone expecting to continue her life of quiet martyrdom, but she had not counted on Marya. Marya had been living at Bald Hills while Andrei was at war, of course, and Andrei and Natasha had anticipated that Sonya and Marya would live on with them into a spinsterhood that was not an ill fate if one had family and friends that one loved and passions of one’s own. It would not have been a bad life for either of them, but, as fate would have it, that was not what happened.

What happened, and what no one anticipated, was that Sonya and Marya fell in love. Their meeting coincided with the time in their life that both women had felt most free; Sonya was finally away from the house of Natasha’s parents, the Count and Countess who had offered her refugee after she was orphaned but who had never let her forget it, and Marya, though she was deeply saddened by the passing of her and Andrei’s father, felt some great burden lift from her once he could no longer inflict his daily and unrelenting small torments upon her.

Natasha and Andrei imposed no expectations upon the two women as so many others had; in fact, the two newly-married lovebirds spent so much of their time in their private wing of the house or engaged in some hours-long outdoor activity such as horseback-riding or brisk walks in the mountains, that Sonya and Marya often found themselves completely alone, save for one another. At first, they continued in their old ways, with Marya appearing almost inhumanely pious and Sonya giving of herself past the point of reason. They grew close because they recognized and admired the giving and good nature in one another. But as they grew closer, they became able to confide what they found to be their failings to one another, their impulses which they found almost abhorrently selfish, although for almost any other people to possess just such minor character defects would have been a great improvement upon their character. Sonya told Marya that Marya’s religious doubts and small sins of things such as jealousy only served to make her human and thus more lovable than ever, and Marya told Sonya that she admired as much the parts of Sonya that strongly desired little aspects of life for herself, not just the part of her which gave so selflessly to others.

In reassuring the other woman, they found that they reassured themselves. It was with one another that they were able, for perhaps the first time in either of their lives, to be fully themselves, and after that it was inevitable that they would fall strongly in love. Their courtship was brief but passionate, and marriage soon followed. Still, even after they married they did not move away but stayed in the house with Natasha and Andrei, for it was big enough that each couple had their own space, and besides, the four of them loved one another more than anything in the world, as dearest family, and did not long to be parted.

And though Pierce and Hunnicutt had moved to the country to find space in which to build a new life of full devotion to one another, they were not so antisocial as to not relish the company of others so long as they had nights to themselves as well. At first it was Andrei and Natasha who came most often to their cottage, for the two couples were dangerously matched in their fierce and unrelenting energy and their tendency toward causing all sorts of mayhem. Often, they would find themselves drinking till too early in the morning and getting themselves into some sort of minor trouble (or more).

But Sonya, too, began to overcome her shyness, and she would stop by the cottage not for late nights of drinking but in the afternoon to help Hunnicutt garden and Pierce cook. At first she remained quiet and was glad to work with them side by side without making much conversation, but they drew her out of her shell and eventually got to know Marya too. By this second spring, the three couples got on well and regularly found themselves having dinner. Hunnicutt and Pierce’s friends from the war, too, would often find their way to the cottage for a visit, and Margaret and Natasha in particular got along.

Hunnicutt, slicing up olives for the bruschetta, and Pierce, making the bread, felt a moment of peace settle onto them in the kitchen. They had found a way to the life they had so craved, had not only each other but friends and community too, the old women and children of the village, the young people of the main house, the war buddies who wrote and stopped by. They had honey and bread and tomatoes, coffee in the morning and vodka at night (though they tried to drink less of it now). There were cold lakes to swim in naked with no one else around, where they could yell as they dove in with no one to hear. There were fields of grass to lay in with the sun beating down on them, where they could fall asleep and know no bad thing might wait for them when they awoke.

After a few years went by, Natasha and Andrei had children, and in helping to raise them, Pierce and Hunnicutt were reminded of their own want for children. Thus they made a trip in to Moscow for the first time in years in order to visit an orphanage. They found one child in particular who they loved at first sight, and who told them she was a little girl but that the adults at the orphanage wouldn’t believe her, and so they took her home with them immediately. At Bald Hills she was able, at last, to grow her hair long and to live as was right and true for her, with nothing but respect and love from not only her fathers but all the adults in her life.

Pierce and Hunnicutt had both always wanted a little girl. Pierce took endless delight in doing her up in pigtails, sewing her dresses and rompers, and trying to talk to her about all sorts of poetry, plays, and music when she was still much too young to really understand what it was he was on about. Hunnicutt, for his part, built her a tree house, taught her to garden, and was often coaxed by her to let her ride on his shoulders around the house or on his back and pretend that he was a horse.

After a few years of this joyful living, they went again to Moscow and brought home a little boy. Thus the families on Bald Hill watched their children grow, watched them eventually leave home and bring back grandchildren and stories of the world. And they lived contentedly to old age in their small corner of the world which was perfect not because there was never strife but because their households had been built on and continued on in love. Pierce and Hunnicutt relished equally the days their house was filled with visitors, whether it be members of the family they’d made together or friends they loved so dearly, and the days when they would sit, just the two of them, old men in rocking chairs on the porch who had lost none of their wit and still expressed their love as much in loving jokes as in companionable silence.

***

But we will not end our story in their old age. Rather we will return to a scene from the first winter that Pierce and Hunnicutt lived at Bald Hills. In winter, the snow came, and there was a pond there on Bald Hills that was perfect for skating. Andrei had to keep Natasha from going out on it the very day that it iced over, remaindering her that the winter would be long and she would have plenty of time to skate when it was safer. And in the coming weeks, Hunnicutt and Pierce would often see them skating. The pond could be seen from the window of their small cottage, and the men could hear Natasha and Andrei’s voices ringing through the trees as they shouted to one another across the pond. Natasha and Andrei would skate arm in arm for a minute, only to break away from one another in order to race each other across the length of the pond, or for Natasha in particular to try some new trick that, more often than not, nearly resulted in some sort of injury for her.

Sonya and Marya, too, would often find their way out onto the ice, although they often skated for just a short time before they found themselves distracted, staring together at some small wonder – the snow on the trees, a fox in the field – that others took for ordinary but which delighted them both to no end. They did not participate in the more rigorous sport that Natasha and Andrei often made of skating, but looked on bemusedly.

When Natasha’s brother Nikolai came to visit, Natasha and Nikolai would work themselves into such a state of wild competition as was not otherwise seen out on the pond. The siblings would invent for themselves more and more daring games until even Andrei was so taken aback by the dangers they got themselves in trying to outdo one another that he found himself unable to participate further. On these occasions, he would often excuse himself and walk to the doctor’s house to see if they were home. Sometimes, they would simply give him some sort of hot drink which they had brewing on the stove, a mead or a spiced cider, and would send him on his way back up to the big house, not unkindly but because they so cherished their time together that they were often not wont to have it interrupted even by the dearest of their friends. Andrei never took this the wrong way, but understood this impulse of the doctors perfectly, and even respected them all the more for it.

Still, sometimes they would let him in, and on those occasions he would stay so long talking that it would grow dark, and Nikolai and Natasha would also find there way to the cottage. The five of them would grow so consumed in their conversation as to forget to eat anything proper, instead stinking up the room with their cigars. Natasha never recused herself from this activity but indeed smoked with much more relish than Pierce. She was also often seen to wear men’s clothing to skate on the pond, as she found it more freeing, both physically and for her spirit, and Andrei would always laugh and affectionately call her, “My little _zaichik_.”****

At first, though Hunnicutt and Pierce would often stand at the window and watch the others skate, they would never skate themselves. Often, as they were wont to do, they would find themselves narrating the events they observed through their window, either affecting the voice of sports commentators as they described Natasha and Nikolai’s more daring exploits, or merely imagining the conversations the others were having with one another. After a week or two of watching from the window, Hunnicutt turned to Pierce with a particular expression on his face that Pierce recognized. Though Hunnicutt had not yet said a word, Pierce said, “Oh no. No, no, no. You are not getting me out on that ice.”

“Come on, Hawk. We were never stationed near a good pond during the war, but I know you must have skated before then.”

“When I was a kid, maybe.”

“When you were a _kid_? Come on, what kind of Russian are you?”

“Not a very good one. I thought I already made that clear with all my pacifist talk during the war.”

“Oh, come on. It’ll be fun!”

“Fun until I break my right elbow and you have to turn our kitchen into an operating room. I can’t have blood on that tablecloth, not when you know Klinger must have spent ages picking it out before he gave it to us as a wedding gift,” Pierce replied obstinately.

“Oh, come on, I’m a great ice skater. I’ll hold your hand!”

“Think of the talk that’ll cause in town!” At this, Pierce put his hand to his mouth in mock shock.

Hunnicutt, instead of merely continuing the verbal argument fruitlessly, moved closer to Pierce, wrapping his arms around him and resting his chin on Pierce’s shoulder before he said into his ear, “Come on. Do it for me?”

“Alright, fine, I’ll do it, but I refuse to have any fun.”

Hunnicutt spent the rest of the afternoon rooting around in the house for his old skates. He found them, but could not find any for Pierce. He made his way up to the main house after dinner, where Andrei greeted him at the door and was more than happy to loan him a pair. The next morning, before anyone else was awake, Hunnicutt succeeded in coaxing Pierce into keeping his promise and the two of them, Pierce wrapped in more furs than was strictly necessary even for a Russian winter, made their way onto the ice.

At first, Pierce stumbled around like a newborn lamb, sliding about so much on the ice as he clutched desperately onto Hunnicutt that it often felt, to the two of them, that they were both about to topple over. But Hunnicutt managed to stay standing, and Pierce, for his part, kept trying. Eventually, they got so they could make their way around the whole edge of the pond somewhat gracefully, Pierce clutching firmly to Hunnicutt’s arm in a way that now seemed more romantic than life or death, though to be sure, he still needed the support. After a while of this, Hunnicutt said, “Okay, I have an idea.”

“Oh, I don’t like this at all,” Pierce said. “Usually, I like your ideas, but given the circumstances, I’m not so sure.”

“No, come on, just trust me,” Hunnicutt said.

Pierce hesitated only a moment. “All right.”

“Let go of my arm.”

“What?”

“Just let go.”

Pierce let go of. Hunnicutt moved forward just a step, and for a moment it seemed he might take off and leave Pierce behind him. But instead he turned to face Pierce, reaching out his hand again. When Pierce took it, Hunnicutt began to skate backward, pulling the other man behind him. At first, they became unsteady again, but eventually, as Pierce became steadier, Hunnicutt was able to skate more smoothly and faster than he had been able to previously, when they were arm in arm. Pierce had, that whole morning, been holding himself tight, afraid to fall. He found he was able, finally, to give himself over to the experience.

It was a perfectly clear day, so that their breath came out almost as ice crystals and the sun shone brilliantly through the trees. It felt as though there were no one in the world but the two of them moving across the pond together. As they skated faster, both men began to let out small whoops of joy. The trees in the mountains echoed their voices back to them, the sound ringing gladly in their ears as if the world itself were affirming, _You are still here, together. Isn’t it good?_

And it was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Regrettably, I don’t have an eye for fashion at all, so please imagine for yourselves what it was they were wearing. If you put it in the comments I might even go back and edit it in to the story. For now it’s the choose your own adventure of fashion.  
> **This is not medical advice. I have no idea what they would have used to treat arthritis in the 18th century and they probably wouldn’t have even called it arthritis but I had to write something here and lavender oil sounds nice. There will be many anachronisms in this chapter, I am sure. Do I know if they grew raspberries or ate bruschetta in 18th century Russia? No. Am I going to do a rudimentary google search to try and figure out this information? Absolutely not.  
> ***I have had this quote from San Junipero rattling around my head forever, so I had to put it in the story.  
> ****According to [this website](https://obliviousmind.com/blog/pet-names-sweet-words-call-russian-boyfriend/), this is the male form of the Russian word for bunny & also a common pet name you’d use for a boyfriend in Russia. I don’t speak Russian so I have no real way to verify if this is true. Love this description from the website, though: “If you look at your Russian boyfriend with as much affection as you look at this cute bunny, he will do anything for you.” And yes, I have been writing Natasha as non-binary within the confines of 18th century Russian society.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!! Sometimes you make one offhand joke about writing a M*A*S*H/War & Peace crossover fic and then, before you know it, you have become deeply invested in the concept and have written 33k words of it in two weeks. But seriously, it means so much to me that there have been people who have appreciated this concept and especially if you’ve read to the end it truly brings me great joy!! Because I am an unhinged person whose apparent main coping mechanism right now is to write M*A*S*H fan fiction at an alarming rate, I have already started another one, the first chapter of which will probably be up pretty soon. It'll obviously show up on my ao3 page/I'll add a link here once it's up just in case anyone is interested. (It's not the short Hemingway parody I just put up lol, it's a different, non-parody multi-chapter one.) But either way, thank you so much for reading this one! I honestly love this little world I built for Hawk & BJ in 18th century Russia, so I might return to it at some point just to write more about them living contentedly in their little cottage. But for now we’ll leave them to ice skate together in peace. Thanks again for reading and for anyone who has left kudos and especially comments! ❤❤❤


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